Workarounds for CoPilot's problems.

[PONDEROUS]

It's useful to see contributions from the USA such as those from BMWBiker, and now lynnk. It becomes more and more clear from what they report that USA road patterns do not show up the routing problems to anything like the same extent.

Just one final point regarding CP 4 unless BMWBiker comes back with more. I entered a few of my most recent offending routes on CP 4 this morning and found that CP 4 does consistently produce shorter routes than CP 5, but, as with the Scraptoft-Rearsby route, still not short enough and still favouring main roads.

[PONDEROUS]

I recently went to the ALK.eu website to see if there were any signs of developments. There were none.

I was also struck by the lack of change to the claims being made on the site. For example, despite the errors and not least the lack of 7-digit postcodes, the claim remains that one can:

[GrimBeard]

Welcome to the ponderous' forum.

It is possible to enter a postcode and CP5 will take you to that area. The fact, and this is a fact in my opinion, others with 'O' levels in English may disagree, that CP5 only uses the first 5 digits to reference said postcode is rarely a problem for me. I don't and can't know how others feel about this. Personally, and this is not a recommendation, fix or workaround, I find the final destination in MS AutoRoute 2005, which incidentaly also uses 5 digit postcode references, then use AutoRoute's location sensor to exactly pinpoint the end point, then use that in CP5, never failed for me.

The 'make a turnaround' issue has not happened to me since I got a true UK install as described in a previous post that all people responded to (thanks KenS). Maybe, and I don't know for certain so don't start, this is due to the differing routing algoritms. Presumably, when the mapping was done, not by ALK I should add, the gaps were open in the barriers and it was possible to 'make a turnaround'. Since then, for safety reasons, many gaps have been closed on dual carrigeway's, no mapping software is completely up to date. Now there will be loads of posts telling me that
extra-coolmapopointdeluxe version 668.2349 is!!!!!!

I've said it before, if you don't like ALK, CP4-5Whatever or the way the program or support works, GET RID, sell it on Ebay, buy TomTom and eff off to their forums. GET OVER IT.

But pleeease end your exasperational whining.

GB

[PONDEROUS]

I'll ignore Grimbeard's usual rubbish - since the Forum Team seem determined to do nothing about him.

However, since Grimbeard has, for a change, actually addressed some of the technical issues that I raised, I will respond to to his contribution.

The turnaround instructions are still happening. They are unacceptable and they contradict the claims made by ALK. Furthermore, if one just keeps quiet about them, then perhaps ALK will imagine that they no longer exist.

[PONDEROUS]

Sorry, but I missed one of the points that Grimbeard did actually take the trouble to address. What he says does of course confirm my point; i.e. CP 5 does not find rural addresses. As a matter of fact, using Pocket Streets (an Autoroute companion for PPC) works around the problem quite well for me as I have said before. However, as the ALK blurb implies (and as their sales team said clearly to me before purchase) Copilot was supposed to find all addresses itself.

All in all, therefore, I am not sure what Grimbeard's objective was - other than, once more, to introduce insult and philistine behaviour. It certainly is not going to deflect me, I can assure him.

[PONDEROUS]

I'll get there in a second!

Grimbeard says that:

[jdw7]

We will be able to forget about ALK and CoPilot's problems very soon. With the announcement that Sony are entering the market, mickey mouse companies like this will be kissing their ar**s goodbye. I doubt if they'll last long enough to release any more V5 updates, let alone V6.

[GrimBeard]

Exactly what usual rubbish am I being accused of, that the Forum team needs to address? Or is sarcasm a crime now.

I actually thought my 'voices' post was rather good.

I didn't say turnarounds could be stopped, I merely gave a reason, my reason, for them happening. You could try editing one of the speech files and removing the reference to 'turnaround' as long as you don't want to 'turnaround'......................ever.

AutoRoute postcode digit number count.............Oh to be perfect.

Objective, to add positive input to an otherwise negative forum, if this also winds-up unspecified forum members then, well, life's a bitch ain't it.

GB (I'll close the door on my way out)

[PONDEROUS]

Looking at the thread to which Grimbeard was apparently referring, entitled Voices and what he now writes, it appears that he seriously thought that my complaint was about the form of words that Copilot uses when instructing an about-turn. The exact words used have never been of interest to me except, of course, where the instructions are misleading or wrong, which is another matter. Neither, for that matter has the sound of the voice.

What I was fact highlighting was that, contrary to the ALK claim, Copilot does not:

[GrimBeard]

GB

[BMWBiker]

[KenS]

[PONDEROUS]

What KenS says clearly makes sense, including his cautionary note about calculating the shortest route.

For this system to work at all, the Shortest route has to be literally shortest when the road type biases are all at zero, or neutral. As we have discovered from the thread that KenS mentions, achieving this is not a matter of adjusting the sliders between Favour and Avoid. It has to be done by calibration during programming at ALK.

However, even if ALK were successfully to calibrate the road preferences, the sliding scales between Favour and Avoid still need to be replaced if KenS is right. Otherwise, if, for example, a road type is set completely to avoid, it will still be included where it produces the shortest route taking all other road types into account. Therefore, a learner driver hoping that Motorways will be excluded may well have problems. Similarly, a truck driver wanting to avoid narrow lanes may find some of them included.

What is needed is a system that produces shortest routes whatever types of road are included or excluded. When a road type is excluded, it needs completely to be excluded, and when it is included, it needs to be completely included. This needs to be true whether we are in Shortest or Quickest mode. We need control of what types of road to expect to find on the routes, and CP 5 does not allow that. CP 5's attmpt to do it by percentages sounds sophisticated and it may seem as if it offers great flexibility, but all it achieves is confusion.

[DanB]

I've read the first three pages of this post and as ever this thread has degenerated into a free-for-all CoPilot ranting session. I'm not even going to tell you what I think of CoPilot because I can't for the life of me see why any of you would give a monkeys what I think about it. Just in the same way that I frankly don't give a monkeys about whether anyone else likes it or not.

But just in case I've made a mistake in skipping through the remaining 12 pages on the basis that they were likely to be just like the first 3 - the same old characters whittering on about the same old gripes for the hundredth time - perhaps someone could answer this simple question -

Has anyone on this thread actually posted an informative and useful suggestion about how we, as users, can make CoPilot better to use?

Thank you

Dan

[Skippy]

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