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Show HN: Ubähnchen – Animated subway map of Berlin

xn--ubhnchen-1za.vercel.app

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Re: Show HN: Ubähnchen – Animated subway map of Berlin

#21

Post by rob74 »

akie wrote: post #4

It's super smooth on Chrome, but it's doing (say) 1 frame per second on Firefox.

It's also smooth for me (also Chrome) in "U-Bahn only" mode, but when I switch to "U+S", it's noticeably less smooth (10 fps?). It gets better if you deactivate the "city map background" in the settings.

Re: Show HN: Ubähnchen – Animated subway map of Berlin

#23

Post by rob74 »

YLE118 wrote: post #15
radiosnob wrote: post #3

Very nice. Given the smoothness, I first thought this was real-time:) As someone who lives in Berlin, I didn't know there was an open API for the VBB. I'll have to have a look at it. And loving the Minimetro vibes! (Running this on android 10 on a OnePlus 7pro - runs smooth in Chrome)

Agreed on the minimetro feel! I thought it was live too, I wonder if there's a way to do that? I like that you can see both the s and u bahn, though I kind of wish the abstract map would carry over.

There is definitely a way to do it, actually the Munich S-Bahn has a realtime map : https://www.s-bahn-muenchen.de/fahren/live-map - not as smoothly animated though, and I'm not sure if the data used there is publically available. As an Easter Egg, the "50th anniversary" train (photo here, but the article is paywalled: https://railcolornews.com/2022/04/26/de-expert-s-bahn-munche...) is highlighted on the map.

Re: Show HN: Ubähnchen – Animated subway map of Berlin

#25

Post by rob74 »

Nice! Would be more realistic (and more Mini Metro-like) if the trains actually stopped at the stations though. Also, the trains don't have to disappear and reappear at the terminal stations, they could just stay there until they are scheduled to go back - after all, that's what they do in reality as well...

Any chance that the source could be made available ;) ?

Re: Show HN: Ubähnchen – Animated subway map of Berlin

#26

Post by Elzear »

YLE118 wrote: post #15
radiosnob wrote: post #3

Very nice. Given the smoothness, I first thought this was real-time:) As someone who lives in Berlin, I didn't know there was an open API for the VBB. I'll have to have a look at it. And loving the Minimetro vibes! (Running this on android 10 on a OnePlus 7pro - runs smooth in Chrome)

Agreed on the minimetro feel! I thought it was live too, I wonder if there's a way to do that? I like that you can see both the s and u bahn, though I kind of wish the abstract map would carry over.

Thanks a lot for the feedback!! The "live mode" is already developed using hafas-client[1] and VBB-API[2]. I just asked VBB to give me API access, I'll release the feature when I get it. If you are interested, VBB already made a live map[3]

1: https://github.com/public-transport/hafas-client 2: https://www.vbb.de/vbb-services/api-open-data/api/ 3: https://www.vbb.de/fahrinfo/

Re: Show HN: Ubähnchen – Animated subway map of Berlin

#30

Post by quantumduck »

radiosnob wrote: post #3

Very nice. Given the smoothness, I first thought this was real-time:) As someone who lives in Berlin, I didn't know there was an open API for the VBB. I'll have to have a look at it. And loving the Minimetro vibes! (Running this on android 10 on a OnePlus 7pro - runs smooth in Chrome)

I don't know if VBB used this, but most transit agencies publish their data in two standard formats these days GTFS for static schedules and GTFS-real time for real-time data. Any application you build around these formats would immediately scale to pretty much every big city.

Google maps and Apple maps provide transit directions in their apps using GTFS and GTFS real time data (partly the reason why Apple maps was able to add transit directions feature so easily - Google had to deal with the transit agencies years before that and convinced them to publish data in open source standard formats).

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