Marble using cloudmade tiles with hillshading

Yesterday¹ I wrote: «Then I found out that it wouldn't be easy to use the tiles [generated by CloudMade] with marble». How wrong was I.

Here you can read how to access the tiles in CM's servers. The only thing you need is an API key, which you can get once you registered (it practically begs you to get one :). Another piece of the puzzle is marble itself. I was specting to copy OSM's service description file and bend it and twist it until it worked with CM's tiles. But things are, luckily, much more simple.

In marble you simply do «File», «Create a new map...», then select «Online map providing indexed tiles», which clearly describes CM. Next, you have to provide and URL template, which you can simply derive from the doc in CM's site. Mine's like this:

http://tile.cloudmade.com/5f806ad32bb44b38a464020fa2223193/51084/256/{zoomLevel}/{x}/{y}.png

You, of course, will have to change the API key and the style number for yours. One thing I found is that the @2x doesn't seem to work with marble; without it it works just fine. Maybe it's a User-Agent thing. Then you keep answering what marble asks you in the wizard. By the end of it, you'll have marble working with your tiles! It's amazing.

One extra hack was to add support for hillshading. These are tiles that are alpha-blended with OSM's, wich gives you the impression of viewing a 3D map (bah, at least in the covered regions with mountains). The service files (.dgml files) are actually XML files quite easy to edit if you defocus and just look at the big picture ot if. So I just simply opened both files (OSM's is in /usr/share/kde4/apps/marble/data/maps/earth/openstreetmap/openstreetmap.dgml, the one you created in $HOME/.local/share/marble/maps/earth/foo/foo.dgml), copied the texture tag that describes hillshading, pasted it in my .dgml file, saved, reopened marble and... voilà! Even better, as hillshading is actually another tile server, marble can share it for OSM's, OSMaRenderer and yours.

The final result is simply amazing. You can see a screenshot here.

More on my use of marble and OSM pretty soon.