direct osm rendering from raw data

osm is slowly taking over... there are many regions where it's simply the best available map data. we should harvesting this power for oruxmaps directly... and not just by downloading tiles.

todays devices can easily render osm tiles from raw data directly on the phone. this allows storing complete countries down to highest zoom levels in just a few hundred megabytes. the same information stored as raster data requires plenty gigabytes.

have a look at http ://www.osmand.net/

osmand downloads and renders osm tiles from vector data happily and quickly. it's free and opensource and obviously written in java. so all we need is to fork the tile rendering code into a tiny little opensource app that offers a "local webserver" on android, rendering and serving the tiles to oruxmaps as needed. that could either be a wms or a simple "google mode" tile server, whatever works best and quickest. oruxmaps itself wouldnt need any changing, it simply queries the local data like http ://localhost:8123/getosmtile?renderconfig=bicycle.xml&x=1&y=2&z=3

i'd say putting together a first working version could be a quick one-day-hack for an experienced android java developer. unfortunately, i am neither into java nor into android yet... so who gives this a try?

I regret not having sufficient Java skills to fully understand your post. But just wondering--could rendering on the phone provide better outdoors maps? I use OSM as my default map source for hiking--and use my tracks to improve OSM--so it's a virtuous cycle. To get elevation lines, I usually use OSM Cyclemap--but those renderings are not always up to date and, understandably, they are oriented more to bicycling than hiking.