alaCarte Maps

an OpenStreetMap tile renderer

Live Demo is live again!

After ten months of downtime, our Live Demo is finally up and running again!

Because of the awesome work of Simon Dreher, who not only fixed his server but also made it publicly available, everyone can have a fresh look at alaCarte now, in all it's beauty. 😊

The server runs a pre-release version of alaCarte 0.4 and will be upgraded to our upcoming Arch Linux AUR package when the next stable version is released.

New Website and upcoming 0.4 Release

alaCarte's website was really getting a little outdated and rusty, and instead of updating all the broken things, I decided to try nikola. It's yet another static site generator written in python, but it currently seems to have more momentum than pelican.

This was done in preparation of the upcoming 0.4 release of alaCarte. In the last few years, quite a few number of changes have built up and we want to release them as soon as the switch to the upstream dir_monitor library is completed. See the changelog for a preview of what you can expect in alaCarte 0.4.

As before, if you want to correct or contribute something to the website, you can do so at the website source repository.

alaCarte 0.3.0 released

After a long time since the last release, the 0.3.0 release has seen a lot of work.

Highlights of the new version:

  • Near complete support for MapCSS styling attributes
  • Rendering of 4x4 tiles ("meta tiles") at the same time to gain speed (and visual quality)
  • Reduced memory consumption thanks to using a STR-Tree for rectangle queries

Of course there were many small fixes and improvements as well. In total 229 files where modified, 4521 lines of code where added and 3996 lines deleted.

This release would not have been possible without our many new contributers. Especially thanks to Dmitry "AMDmi3" Marakasov for his work on extending the MapCSS support and Mixaill for the MinGW support.

alaCarte 0.2.1 released

AlaCarte Screenshot

Today we published alaCarte version 0.2.1, our student lab course project we worked countless hours on in the last semester, as open source software.

What is alaCarte?

alaCarte is a tile renderer for OpenStreetMap data written in C++11, using Cairo for rendering and Boost-Spirit for MapCSS parsing.

The rendered tiles are served over HTTP using the Slippy map tilename convention.

To compute which data is needed for rendering a tile, alaCarte uses a variant of a kd-Tree.

alaCarte was designed with medium dataset size in mind. On a typical machine with at leat 8GB RAM, alaCarte can handle a unfiltered export from the federal state of Baden-Wuerttemberg (Germany).

alaCarte was developed as part of a student software project at KIT.

We have a live demo, you can check out the code at github and if you speak German you can view the slides of the finishing presentation of the project.