Hi, I may have missed earlier posts, so apologies if this is already covered elsewhere, but a couple of comments....

When I'm planning a flight, I find there's often not enough features displayed on the map to use as waypoints .  I know I can search for towns, but to plan a route in my neck of the woods (NE scotland), I have to use my CAA maps to identify features, that I then have to search for before I can identify them in skyangel.  I'd much rather be able to see any significant towns or villages on the software directly.  There are very few towns actually displayed, and those are not named nor for the most part can they be used directly as waypoints without adding a user waypoint (at least as far as I can see).  Even most of the larger towns are not displayed (huntly and keith for example).  Is it therefore possible to make these smaller towns and villages appear as zoom level is increased and for these to be usable directly as waypoints?  It would make planning much easier to just pick a point off the digital map than have to identify one first elsewhere.  Same comment for lakes/lochs (names would be useful too - perhaps only when a place is hovered over?)

Search function also returns some odd results or no results for towns that are significant as waypoints.  Ballater, reasonable sized town, gives a little village (i presume) called ballaterich or similar nearby.  Rhynie, small town or village west of Insch VRP is posted in a different place to that shown on the CAA maps.  Huntly - returns somewhere in England with a different (similar) name.  Keith returns dalkeith.  I know there are thousands and thousands of towns and villages to put in the database, but until they're there, the basic flight-planning is compromised.

I like the software, love the Notam plotting and weather features, but planning in sparsely populated areas would be made much easier if the few identifiable landmarks were posted as  matter of course and in exactly the right places. 

Anyone else have similar issues?

Steve

Displayed towns and villages in East Anglia are a bit few and far between, but most of them seem to be there on the database if searched for.



Is there any way of having some user-defined places or landmarks (i.e. other than route waypoints) that are stored and thus displayed permanently?

Steve, this is my fault. We have a database of all towns in the UK, which is comprehensive and pretty much any town should be found if you search for it. However if we were to plot all these towns on the map, it would be chaos (I tried). So, we combine the first database with census data on populations to determine which towns actually get shown on the map, and at what zoom level.

So far, I'd only got census data for England incorporated. I've now merged the population data for Scotland too, so you should see many more towns starting in the next release. If you'd like to contact me directly through the contact link at the bottom of the page, I can send you a preview build including this functionality for your feedback.

Up/Down, so far we only have user waypoints as configurable options. At one point I envisaged a feature whereby once you'd searched for a town it would remain visible forever but a better solution will be to keep improving our data so this eventually isn't necessary at all.

Hi



its looking very nice to use on first impressions.



I searched for two largish towns very near to my base Kilrush Co. Kildare EIKH.

kildare popped up but newbridge did not although its much larger.

i exited and reloaded the prog but my "finds" had disappeared.



my q. is can the users collaborate to add stuff?

JM

May I also add that the towns and villages in the NE of Scotland are slightly misaligned from their real positions.



This was first detected on a recent flight when my post flight track imported from SkyAngel Plan, showed that I actually turned some miles short of the SkyAngel position for a village, even though I actually turned on top of the village. On looking at today's release (v0.9.10) I see that as I zoom in the software does indeed now act as you described, with more towns and villages being displayed as the zoom level increases. However, this new functionality also now makes it easy to see the misaligned centres of population. If you zoom in to the area of the Moray firth coast in the vicinity of Elgin and Buckie you can clearly see that all the coastal towns and villages (Lossiemouth, Buckie, Findochty, Portknockie, Cullen, etc) are all placed some 1 to 2 nm south (i.e. inland) of their actual positions. The position of the marker for Elgin is some 0.6 nm W of where it should be, Keith is 1.5 nm SE of where it should be, etc. Although some of these errors in position are very minor, some errors have been as much as 2 nm.



Apart from these minor errors in positional data the software is superb and I am a big fan. I often use Plan to get a idea of timings for a particular route - if the route will take longer than the time I have available then I can very quickly and easily adjust it before carrying out full flight planning. I will upload the final route to InFlight to act as a backup to standard VFR nav techniques (it's very handy to check if you are indeed where you think you area and for quick and easy position reports and ETA checks).



Great work Tim - keep it up!

Thanks for the continued feedback, both of you.

We've at last changed the town database we're using, starting with next week's 0.9.11 version. This database no longer has every single little settlement, but instead has more accurate locations of every place of a size likely to be useful to aviation navigation. I can confirm that Newbridge now appears near Kilrush as you would expect. Unfortunately the towns on the Scottish coast seem little better placed - some still appear a mile or so inland - but this is a big improvement generally, nonetheless. At least Portsmouth doesn't appear to be in the sea any more.

I'm just working in V13 now - a few comments/suggestions:-

1) Scottish towns are still in the wrong place - not major, but annoying.

2) any chance of having context specific zoom-sensitivity when displaying towns and villages.  To be able to display sufficient towns in North-east and highland scotland to be able to plan a route easily, the map needs to be zoomed-in to a level that means you often can't see even the previous turning point.  This I guess is a function of the relative sparsity of population.  What works in the south of England (or even makes for a cluttered map in the south) is too sparse to display an appropriate number of  turning points in the north of Scotland.  Maybe MFC_flyer can comment as well as he's another NE scotland user?

3) Many of the towns that are displayed are unlabelled - again a function of population size and zoom level.  No problem with that, but it would be really useful if the name could pop-up when the town was hovered over with the mouse, and if when route planning these towns could be selected when they are displayed, even if (to reduce clutter) their name is not displayed.

4) Given sparsity of populated places, any chance of names for other geographical features - lakes, prominent mountains etc?

cheers,

Steve

Unfortunately at this point I've done all I can before release. I agree that it would be great in future to have different zoom level triggers for populated places depending upon the relative density of population in the general area, but this just wasn't possible (along with your other suggestions above) for the first release.

I don't like the way towns appear in BeNeLux either, where the problem is reversed. It will get better, in future, of that you can be sure.

Can I firstly say I love the software. It's by far the best integrated planning tool available period.

However hailing for the deep dark north I too find the lack of towns and villages frustrating when route planning and the search function doesnt really help as I dont always know names of places and locations.

IIRC was there not a feature in the early beta releases where one could right click and then list nearby towns and villages. Selecting one made it visible and therefore available as a waypoint.

Alternatively how about a filter similar to the NOTAM radius or Airspace altitudes to select the level of detail visible.

Also, any reason why Kirkcaldy has been relocated to somewhere between Aviemore and Aberdeen ?

I'd love to be able to improve the visibility of smaller towns in Scotland. In the latest release we managed to do this on a country level; countries that are sparsely populated in general have different thresholds for when towns become visible, and so do densely-populated countries. However at present we have to specify an average for the entire UK which is why Scotland doesn't have as many towns presented. All I can say at the moment is that we hope to make this better in the future.

There is a little-known (and poorly documented) feature where if you hold down shift and click the map, it gives you a list of nearby entities including towns that aren't plotted on the map.