Show HN: Piste.io
piste.io
piste.io
- Takes a long time to load
- Runs fine on my newish MBP but runs like a dog on my Linux desktop
- I am having a hard time controlling the camera position using the trackpad. Maybe with a mouse it would be better. If the arrow keys worked that might help.
- Some instructions on how to use it would be great.
- As they are, the camera and style squares appear to be clickable buttons instead of just headings.
The loading time is due to it having to load the elevation data, although it will be cached on subsequent visits, and it is further slowed down by client side processing, which is currently done in JS, but in the future will be hardware accelerated
As for the controls, do you find it more difficult than something like Google Earth? I was hoping that people used to that would be at home with the controls. What exactly would you expect the arrow keys to do? Simulate a mouse movement in that direction by a constant?
As for instructions, were there any parts in particular that were tough to figure out. I think one needs to strike a balance between having no hints and pointing out the blatantly obvious.
(2) Is the site name a homophone of 'pissed'?
PS: After 20 seconds of looking at panorama view, I started hearing a wind like sound, and was just thinking "oh nice, let me hear that", and then realised that it was my macbook air's fan cooling the cpu.
The code itself is optimized, I just have a background worker thread finding primes to get the fans spinning.
Apart from some performance and usability issues this is one of the better piste visualisations I have seen.
To be truly awesome it could use some context. For example: villages, roads (only those open in winter), restaurants and piste facilities, but most of all: accommodations. I can easily see myself using something like this to compare the location of various chalets, apartments, hotels etc. Partner opportunity?
Also it would be great if you can browse neighbouring ski areas. This is something most traditional maps lack – but I can see it becoming a great way to browse for nice runs in a certain area.
Edit: Oh and it would also help to at least include the actual ski area names. I was looking for "Portes du Soleil", but you have listed it as "Avoriaz", even though you seem to have included the entire area.
I do have a minor constructive criticism however. When in panorama mode, there's a lot of up-down-up-down action, at least on parts of the Zugspitze. I'm guessing the camera is just tracing the contours of the mountains, but on rough terrain, it's a bit motion-sickness-inducing. A bit of smoothing of the camera's path would go a long way. I think a steadicam shot from a helicopter is everyone's real-world point of reference for something like this. Mimicing that might go a long way.
Anyway, amazing work. I hope to see some North American mountains in future releases.
Thanks for the feedback on the camera movement, there is some smoothing, but it is on a much smaller scale. I originally did have a helicopter steady-cam style camera for the panorama, but switched to following the terrain to make for more dramatic camera movements. But if it makes people sick, I guess this is a bit of an own goal...
US resorts are coming, just need to process the data.
I do like following the terrain; it's just a bit much at a few points during the panorama. It's 90% perfect. Maybe you could split the difference between terrain and helicopter.
Any plans to add non-resort mountains?
While I'm throwing out feature requests, it would be really cool to see the surrounding terrain from certain points on the mountain. I'd love to see what a skier sees from the top of the mountain.
Definitely not against adding non-resort locations, if there's a good reason. Ping any suggestions to @pisteio. Crater Lake is one I'd like to add once I've got the US working.
Entering ski-mode let's you kind of achieve what you describe, although you are not stationary - I like the idea of lookout points
Forwarded it to my co-worker who is really big into snowboarding. He's was very impressed. Only complaint is he wants to see it done for more local hills.
There's also a great talk that discusses this from JSconf2014 [1]
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/11/02/us/politics/pa... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90NsjKvz9Ns
What would be great is this data available in a mobile app, with no internet connection required (because even though 3G coverage is good, for a lot of Europeans when you're skiing you're usually on holiday and so roaming). Then I might actually be able to find my way around.
Where does the data come from? Is it manually entered from the Piste Map?
The data comes from the EU-DEM project, with the pistes extracted from OSM.
Runs fine on my Windows laptop, that is a bit of a beast, but my Linux machine can't handle it (probably the graphics card).
As it takes a while to load the default resort, Avoriaz, might be better to show a screen shot and some explanation of what it is, with 'click on a resort' (initial load may take some time).
If you map Les Arcs, I'll be able to give some feedback on how realistic the runs are.
I didn't get much sense of scale. It's hard to tell how big a skiier would be in comparison to the mountain. Could there be an option for third-person view with an average-height skiier model?
I see you want to add trees, i guess that would also help alleviate this.
Is it possible to pan the view when viewing the whole resort? I kept trying to get "just the right view".
It also appears that many of the longer runs end early instead of going the full length of the piste. Still, a very impressive proof-of-concept.
Chrome 39.0.2171.71 on OSX 10.10.1.
One question, why does the camera 'rock and roll' when previewing a route? Personally I'd prefer a smooth panning motion... (the rocking made me feel a little queezy...)
EDIT: and yes, the grey pane with no indication it's loading is annoying
It might be a good idea to reflect actual snow conditions, at least approximately. Of course that will get depressing, but accuracy seems in order.
win64/Opera
* i have no idea what this website does.
on ipad
It was on Avoriaz, la pointe de l'au