Creating a map

This page describes how to create a new map for DepNav and add it into the app.

Prerequisites

You are expected to have these on your hands:

1. A set of images with floor schemes comprising the map. For convenience the images should be in WebP format and have the same dimensions divisible on square tiles of some size (e.g. 256x256, this is configurable).
2. An image to be used as a logo, preferably in a vector format.

Step 1: create map tiles

In DepNav maps consist of "floors" split on tiles with several zoom levels — so-called tile pyramids. The pyramids are stored in app/src/main/assets/tiles as $MAP_NAME/floor$FLOOR_NUM/$ZOOM_LEVEL/$ROW/$COLUMN.webp where $MAP_NAME can be arbitrary, $FLOOR_NUM starts from 1, $ZOOM_LEVEL, $ROW and $COLUMN start from 0.

The easiest way to obtain such pyramids is to use tools/create_tiles.sh — the usage instructions are written inside the file, on Windows you will need WSL to run it. The script will generate a pyramid for each floor, you need ti place them in the assets directory as specified above (e.g. app/src/main/assets/tiles/test-map/floor1/$ZOOM_LEVEL/$ROW/$COLUMN.webp).

Step 2: add your map's logo

Use Android Studio's Resource Manager to import your map's logo. The resource must be named logo_$MAP_NAME with hyphens replaced with underscores (e.g. logo_test_map) and be of type drawable.

Step 3: add your map to app's database

SQLite database app/src/main/assets/maps.db describes all maps available to the app. Although you can modify the database directly it may be easier to write a JSON file describing your map and then use a script to insert this data into the database for you:

1. Create a JSON file and fill it in accordance with data/map-info-schema.json.
   • The schema provides descriptions for each field you need to fill, you can configure Android Studio to help you follow the schema
   • JSONs in data/jsons can serve as examples
   • Internal map name you specify in the JSON must be $MAP_NAME you used in the previous steps (test-map in the examples above)
2. Run tools/create_map_db.py providing it with the path to the database and to your JSON.
   • Use --help to see the usage instructions
   • Important note: DepNav copies the database from the assets and updates that copy only when the version of the database in the assets increases — this means that in order to update the database of an already installed app you need to either clear the app's storage (in your device's settings) or increase the database version (via the corresponding parameter of create_map_db.py AND in the app's code here).

If you have created a new database place it at app/src/main/assets/maps.db overwriting the old one.