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Ok, i just realized how much more disk-space those single files actually need then a single one. Therefore the AndNav-Format is no option for me neither ;(

But there's one question left for me:
How do you guys manage to create maps with mobac smaller than 2 GB. The problem for me is that the software doesn't display how large the resulting file would be.
The only way I can think of is to approximate the size by the number of selected tiles, but (obviously) 1 tile has not always the same size...

To clarify this a little bit I've just created 2 maps with a nearly similar number of tiles:

1. Center of London: 3546 tiles -> Resulting sqlite-db 56,7 MB (approx. 16,6 Bytes per tile)
2. Somewhere in Panama (partly city, partly forest): 3592 tiles -> Resulting sqlite-db 10.7 MB (approx. 3 Bytes per tile)

How do i know now before creating the map how to choose the zoom-levels and the size of the selected region to not exceed the 2 GB limit in the resulting file?
Trial and error is definitely not the way to go because on one hand the download of large maps with mobac takes pretty long and on the other hand it produces a lot of trafic on the servers...

Thanks, for every advice on this topic!

Hi there!

I've been following this thread with high interest and have an idea:

Have you ever considered supporting the AndNav-Format for stored offline-maps?
I know that the Geocaching-App GeOrg supports it and that mobac can create them too.

Because of the fact, that AndNav-Maps are based on single files (every tile in the map is represented by one file) there are some advantages towards the sqlite-database-files:

• There are no limitations when it comes to single files (2 GB for Android as discussed in this thread, 4 GB for FAT-Formated SD-Cards, ...) because obviously there will never be 1 single file that big
• One can download large areas in mobac with high zoom-levels in multiple steps (if necessary because of the 500.000 tiles limitation in mobac) and still handle it as 1 map.
  I'm gonna explain this point a little more in detail later with an example.
• Those maps would also be supported by GeOrg.
  I know that this isn't exactly an advantage from your point of view but I do need both programs and would love to have one map-base for both of them.
  Actually GeOrg is also able to read the same sqlite-maps as Locus does but it's not able to load 2 maps at a time what would be necessary if a map is larger than 2 GB (as discussed in this thread)...
  Please let me know if it's not clear what i mean with this point. It's a little hard to explain.

One disadvantage that i can think of is that the handling of so many single small files could be a problem for the performance. At least in comparison with databases I'm pretty sure that the performance would decrease a little but as much as i can tell GeOrg is able to handle large AndNav-Maps pretty well so either it's not really that big a deal with the performance or they have pretty good algorithms to handle those maps...

Finally I got to admit that I'm not too familiar with the design of your app and how much work it would be to support AndNav-Maps but maybe i was able to give you some new input and a new idea on how to solve the problem with bigger maps...

Thanks & best regards!