Constant POI overlaps

[davidv]

I just picked up XPOI and must say it's a very innovative product. There is one issue that I consantly get though, and that's two or more POI's being in the exact same spot and completely overlying each other making the icon and text unreadable for both, or far too many POIs in one area causing a lot of clutter. I've seen this in Canada and even in the Washington demo area for the US.

I previously tried FSDiscover but found its database was a bit lacking for Canada (where I do all of my flying) - I'm quite surprised and pleased with how much data Geonames actually has for Canada. The problem is many of the POIs in Canada aren't put in the proper categories. Towns are all labeled as parks for example. Its not a huge deal having the wrong icon - but this means I can't just disable certain categories to declutter, as all the creeks are in the same categories as major rivers, towns appear as parks and so on.

The one thing FSDiscover did that I think might be a great option for XPOI is for areas with many POI's concentrated in a small area only a few would show at a time, and every few seconds it would alternate between them. Even having this for multiple POIs in one location would be quite helpful. Either that or just have XPOI only display a fixed amount of labels in a given area, and randomly choose which show and which don't or something like that.

As things are right now there's just way too much on the screen at once in certain areas and the enjoyment suffers for this, I hope FSDreamteam will consider adding some feature like the two I suggested above to address this.

Otherwise great product, makes VFR a lot more interesting.

I've attached several screenshots showing the issue - make sure your browser window is fullscreen so the whole image shows.

[virtuali]

Have you tried the different settings of the "POIs with inexact coordinates" option ?

Most of the overlapping issues happens because many geonames.org POIs are stored with just degrees-minutes of Latitude and Longitude, with the -seconds part truncated to 0.

XPOI handles these points specifically. If a point has BOTH the Latitude and Longitude values with the seconds at 0, it would consider that one an "inexact" POI.

With the above option, you can specify what to do with these POIs.

If you say to "Ignore", the POI will simply not be displayed, "Use Inexact coordinates" will simply leave it as it is, and "Spread Randomly", will display the POI in a slightly (random) position from the location stored in the database.

Many of the problems with overlapping can be usually fixed with this option.

[davidv]

Thanks for the quick reply!

I'm fairly sure I already have it in the spread randomly option, I'll cycle through the options and see what happens.


BTW flying around my home town I noticed it even had a drainage ditch labelled that runs from our farm's pond to the main creek in the area, now that's detail lol.

[davidv]

Well I tried changing the option for inexact coordinates but no matter what I choose these POI's still overlap in both of these images.



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[virtuali]

Well I tried changing the option for inexact coordinates but no matter what I choose these POI's still overlap in both of these images.

Then it means these are not having the truncated coordinates, but are *just* duplicated points, or points with coordinates which are *very* close.

Are they of the same class AND sub-class ?

[davidv]

No actually - they are often of different classes. It seems for Canada in many locations they just group a bunch of POIs for the particular town or location all together in one spot. There are often many duplicate POI's for the same spot as well (see the Elora Gorge screenshots, there were 4 different labels for this one geographical feature). This is very common throughout Canada. I just did a flight through Southern Ontario (where I live) and in just one spot there were over 5 examples of this within a few miles. This happens in rural areas even more so than urban it seems as well. The classifications aren't too great for the Canadian POI's either - all small towns are labeled parks for example. Not a big deal having the wrong icon but it means you can't filter out "smaller" POI's for the more major ones, they are all in the same categories.

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