Map Cruncher 3.0 Released

Need to crunch more tiles? Need to crunch them faster? Now you can! Download the latest version of Map Cruncher @ https://research.microsoft.com/mapcruncher. Here's a high-level list of new features:

• Far more robust -- major internal restructuring of the code makes things much more reliable
• Integrated with v4.0 MapControl API -- including support for the new 3D Virtual Earth!
• Transparency! Select background colors to be removed, or foreground colors to be kept, to allow maps to be better overlaid without losing underlying data
• "Auto legends" -- trace out the legend that appears on your map, and MC generates a web page so the legend pops up automatically when that source map is in the user's view
• Standard (sample) web page has integrated "Find" box, to let users search the yellow pages for items on the crunched map
• MC now emits bounds to the crunched.xml file describing where the mashup is defined. Prevents the web browser from requesting many non-existant tiles.
• Supports zoom levels up to 32
• Allows per-source-map specification of max zoom level to render, allowing better composition of maps with insets
• Easier on your disk: MapCruncher actually cleans the disk cache every so often
• Easier on your RAM: MapCruncher can now handle big mashups with many sourcemaps without thrashing virtual memory. It loads them into memory in turns in a sensible order
• Supports zoom levels up to 32 (approximately .03mm/pixel).
• Command-line rendering now supported, when invoked with a command line a .yum file parameter and the "-render" flag,
• The UI now allows you to reorder and remove sourcemaps and layers.
• Layer preview: click on a layer name, and the left panel shows a preview of the rendered layer. This is very helpful for putting the sourcemaps in the layer in the right order, and for tweaking the bounds of the sourcemaps.
• The minimum number of points required to lock is now only two. For many types of source maps, this can dramatically reduce the effort required to set up correspondences.
Bug fixes:
• The previous version performed image warping in the wrong space, so maps with large extent (particularly in extreme latitudes) rendered incorrectly. Alaska looks much better now.
• In the previous version, the cache or the rendered output could contain stale tiles based on out-of-date correspondences, giving confusing results that could only be fixed by manually flushing the cache and the rendered output. Fixed.