Thread: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
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gkuenning is offline gkuenning
2011-07-02 , 23:15
Posts: 67 | Thanked: 36 times | Joined on May 2010 @ Claremont (LA), California
#754
Originally Posted by MartinK View Post
Note that when modRana gets a new voice message while there is already one playing, the new one is skipped.
IMHO your patch only increases the distance - so maybe it just increases the distance for short segments to be larger than their length, so that their announcement is triggered at once when switching to the segment and then being skipped because the last announcement is still playing ?
Yes, all my patch does is to increase the distance, so I bet that's exactly the problem. The fix would be something like "if an announcement is playing and we're still ahead of the waypoint, reduce the distance so we can try again in a little while."

Originally Posted by MartinK View Post
  • some long on-highway segments have announcements too far ahead
    This is caused by Google setting the default turn distance too high (I have seen 2,5+ km, which is IMO too much even on a highway).
    In extreme cases the announcement might be even skipped due to overlapping with the last one.
  • generally when on highway (long segments + high speed), more announcements at a varied distance would definitely be handy
  • I have hacked in some rounding to the voice output (325 meters -> 320 meters) which made it definitely quicker to "get to the point"
    Some more advanced rounding might make it even quicker (300..330 = 300, 333..367 = 350, 351..400 = 400, etc.).
In my area, Google sometimes does the opposite. My favorite is that the waypoint for "take the exit" from a high-speed road is sometimes at the END of the exit so that if the ramp is a long one, you have to be on the exit before you get the announcement.

I agree with the "more announcements" thing. When we moved to New Zealand we rented a car with a GPS, and it would often announce the next turn many km ahead and then give a sort of count down. It was very helpful.

The rounding is a really good idea; "In 321 meters" is kind of silly when you're traveling at 20+ meters per second. The trick will be to make it sensible at different speeds, short distances, and in both metric and U.S. units. I tried to fiddle with some advanced rounding code in this post and quickly discovered that it's a bit trickier than what I want to do before breakfast! :-(
 

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