v2.4.0 — Visual quality and data accuracy

What's new

• Lower Swat poster, reframed and relit. Barikot, Shingardar Stupa, White Palace, Elum Ghar and Malam Jabba are now in frame. The dark foreground is lifted to the same tonal balance as the Swat Valley poster, and Mingora reads as a warm town. Places hidden behind a ridge are drawn hidden (hollow dot, dashed leader). The new poster is also the Lower Swat cover.
• Close views on the live map. Within about 9 km, shaded ground keeps more of its colour with a cool teal fill. Wide views are unchanged.
• Nearer trees look like conifers. Trees within 1.5 km use a jagged, drooping shape on the high-quality tier. Far trees are thinned slightly to pay for them, so the triangle count stays the same.
• Lower Swat road classes from evidence. 596 roads are classed from their OpenStreetMap surface, smoothness and tracktype tags instead of the road type alone. Planner times on 13 Lower Swat legs are 1–3 minutes shorter. Distances agree with Wikipedia to within 9%.

Data sources and licences

Copernicus DEM GLO-30 · ESA WorldCover 2021 (CC BY 4.0) · Sentinel-2 cloudless 2016 by EOX IT Services GmbH (CC BY 4.0) · © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL) · photos via Wikimedia Commons, each credited · Poly Haven sky (CC0) · TRELLIS (MIT) shapes and procedural stupas · English audio guide by Chatterbox (MIT). Heights exaggerated and landmarks drawn larger than life; the map says so.

Known issues

• 764 km of Lower Swat tertiary road has no surface tag in OpenStreetMap and still counts as a jeep road (14 km/h), so some planner times, such as Saidu Sharif to the White Palace, are long.
• White Palace size is an estimate (no published dimensions, no OSM building outline).
• Close-view shade is olive rather than teal on brown slopes. Mingora is small at poster scale.
• Offline save has not yet been tested with a real service worker.
• Missing places (Neel Dand, Ichikhor and others) still have no checkable coordinates.