Welcome to the Route Generator page

Route Generator is a free tool to draw routes on a map and generate a movie from it. This movie can be imported in your video editing software (e.g. Pinnacle Studio), so you can add it to your own movies.

News

28 March 2010: Released version 1.3.1 of Route Generator.

In this minor update a few issues have been resolved:

• Automatic curve generation (in interpolation mode) did't work as expected and caused problems with sharp angles in the route (e.g. when going back on the same route). This problem has not been fixed, yet, but this feature has been disabled for now. Optionally this feature can be re-enabled through a new "Advanced" tab in the Route Generator Preferences.
• The "Advanced" tab also contains settings to control the update rate of the vehicle orientation.
• Draw mode will automatically be disabled when clicking on "Playback" or "Generate", to make sure that the route is interpolated first (in interpolation mode).
• First click on the map (after activating "Draw mode"), is now painted on the map as well.
• Route Generator installation now happens through an installer file, instead of manually extracting a zip-file.

This version can be downloaded from the Download section.

23 August 2009: Released version 1.3 of Route Generator

This version contains the following new features:

• Variable route speed and automatic interpolation
• Bmp2Avi preferences (e.g. selecting different codec or frame rate of generated avi)
• Undo while drawing route (redo not implemented, let me know if you think it's useful)
• Select different line styles for your route
• Extended tutorial with new features (see Help->Tutorial)

13 September 2008: Released version 1.2.3 of Route Generator

Today I released version 1.2.3 of Route Generator. It contains one bugfix:

When a route contained more than 1000 frames (i.e. after about 40 seconds), the Bmp2Avi conversion step failed, because the frame numbering resulted in wrong ordening of the frames in the final AVI. As a result the route jumped to the last frame after a few seconds. In this version this problem is solved.

PS. I also received some new feature requests, I added them to the Planning section.

Story

My name is Michiel Jansen. I started developing this program as a hobby project, because I could not find any free (and simple to use) route generation software. I've already used it successfully for a few of my own video editing projects and I think it works quite well. So I thought that others might find it useful as well and I decided to make it available on my homepage as Route Generator v1.0.

I posted a message on a Dutch forum of a site about video editing (AE-Video.nl), with the request if people wanted to download the program and give it a try. I received a lot of positive feedback. Some people started suggesting the program on other video editing forums as well. The datalimit of my home page was reached a few times and even a tutorial was written for it (see Links section)

Then I decided to create a SourceForge project for it and released version 1.1 of Route Generator on this project page. I also started this dedicated website.

Below you can see an example movie created with Route Generator and a screenshot of the program.

Example of a route movie that I created using Route Generator and Pinnacle Studio.	Screenshot of Route Generator

License

Route Generator is released under the GPL license, this means you can use and distribute it for free. (See README.txt in the downloaded zip-file for more details)

Download

The executable version is only available for Windows and it has been tested on Windows XP/SP2, Vista and Windows 7. The source code is also provided in a separate zip-file, so it can be build on Linux or Mac OS as well.

Want to try it out? The installer is available on the SourceForge project page, where you can optionally download older versions as well.

You can also use the direct links below:

Full installation	routegen-win32-1.3.1.exe
Update existing installation (smaller file)	routegen-win32-1.3.1-patch.exe
Source code	routegen-src-1.3.1.zip

NOTE: Route Generator uses Bmp2Avi (Copyright (C)) Paul Roberts 1996 - 1998) to convert the generated BMP files (i.e. the frames) to an AVI file. Unfortunately Bmp2Avi is only available for MS Windows, so the BMP to AVI conversion step will not work on Linux!

Links

Thanks to the following persons who are supporting Route Generator by linking to it from their site:

• Aat Eeland of AE-Video.nl has put a link on the home page.
• Achim Wagenknecht of Winopen.de (a site that unlocks the world of free open source software for everyone), has placed a download link and description of Route Generator on his site.
• Joop Woldman of http://www.studio9plus.nl, has already succesfully used the program and has even written tutorials for it and they can be found here:
  • Route Generator (PDF, HTML)
  • Make icons for Route Generator (PDF, HTML)

Planning

A list of new features (ideas) that can be added in future versions of Route Generator (in random order). Since I'm developing on Route Generator in my spare time, there's no real planning for which features will be added when. Probably the chance of the appearances of new features will be higher in the winter period ;-).

• Add multi language support (at least Dutch, besides English)
• Make Route Generator independent of Bmp2Avi
• Zoom functionality for easier drawing of routes
• Cancelling route generation
• Make separate movies of chosen segments of the route
• Automatically scrolling of the map below the vehicle, so one large map can be used instead of cutting out the maps yourself. In combination with the previous item, all route scenes you want to add to your movie can be generated in one go.
• Project files: Saving and re-opening routes, etc.

If you have suggestions for new features or other questions, please let me know.

You can find my e-mail address in the help->about menu of Route Generator or the README.txt file in the zip-file.