In reply to DM1LE:
Hi Stephan,
Well, speaking first as a member of the group, which includes some pretty technically able people, I’d say one might try to take a look at the code behind the page to get an idea of how it works. In Firefox (also IE, Chrome and Opera; Safari uses Ctrl+Alt+U), you’d press the Ctrl+U key combination (“Source” or “Page source”), a popup window appears and you can see the HTML source code - scroll to the bottom and you can see links to various Javascript files. A couple of these have names beginning with “sotamaps”, so it’s pretty fair to assume they’re written specifically for the SMP. Click on each of these in turn to load them into the window, use the Edit->Search menu function in that window to search for “panorama” and away you go. No secrets there…
Your search should reveal that “Google is your friend” - you will see that the SMP uses the Google Maps API and in particular, that the panorama functions are based on Google Streetview. And herein lies the problem, which is specific to those countries - Germany, Austria and a few others - which have, rightly or wrongly, banned Google from driving up and down the country taking panoramic views of every highway, street and country lane.
Here’s something you can try when you have a spare moment: in Google maps, or the SMP, zoom out to take a look at the whole of Europe, and then drag the little “Streetview” figure over Europe, but don’t drop it anywhere. You’ll see large areas of Europe highlighted in blue, meaning that streetviews exist where the blue colour appears: but most of Germany, and all of Austria and the Baltic states for instance, remain untouched by the blue coloration. In these uncolored areas, the Streetview functions simply cannot work as intended.
But Google doesn’t just give up there: it will try to find something - anything - to show the desired object in some or other panorama in its’ database. And in the case of the summit in question, it finds a panorama taken by some hiker who was standing at a location “near enough” (the summit of the Brauneck, as you rightly point out) to the desired summit to show at least something, even if it’s a rather distant view. Admittedly, in these cases, one may notice that it doesn’t always get the correct direction of view to the desired object - you have to pan around a bit. Nonetheless, it’s pretty clever, don’t you think?
That means the Panoramaview has definitely no relation to the Seekarkreuz.<< - well, not quite: see above.
Now, speaking as the author and administrator of the SMP (which is not affiliated with SOTA or SOTAWatch), I’d say: if you have a question relating specifically to the SMP - especially when it concerns a technical matter such as the one you raise here - you would perhaps better be served by using the Contact form in the SMP itself. This way, you could get a response guaranteed to deal specifically with your enquiry - it’s what the “Contact” page is there for…
Hope you were able to activate DL/MF-011 OK, and that there wasn’t too much snow up there :)…
Servus und 73, Rob DM1CM
