yippeekyaa wrote:Maybe they are recalculating the city layer nightly?
(You really don't want to know the digging I did over time to know all of this. Buuuuuuuut....)
Okay. So there is a gray cities layer, and a layer that shows names of cities for the gray layer. If memory serves me, they're 'cities_01' and 'cities_names'. As best I can reverse engineer, these are only generated at map tile generation time. They're used in the following ways:
Waze client (Android at least): BOTH
Waze Livemap: Only the placement of city names
You can verify this by checking for the presence of a city name in both the client and livemap, and you'll see they're always rendered in the same spots regardless of zoom.
There's another layer - the one WE call the 'city layer' in the context of WME. That's cities_p, with its own name layer that matches those polygons. It's rendered in multiple colors.
If the above is how this works,
and Waze could tell us either way, right?, IMHO, it'd be to our advantage to have cities_p update as often as Waze will do it. Two big reasons:
1. The closer to real time this layer is run, the more often we can check the cities layer to see if smears have been resolved or new bogus cities have appeared - particularly if they increase the number of colors and boldness of borders to make them easier to see; and they may be caught/removed before they're ever even seen on the clients. But,
especially,
2. I'm almost certain that 'The highlighted road is too far from the city it was added to' is dependant on the cities_p layer, not the one we see on the live map tiles. Put another way, if the city polygon layer for WME were run with each edit, we'd never have the 'M, Ohio covers half the state' problem ever again**. In any case, the more often it runs, the less we'll see it. I can happily add a fictitious 'T, California' on two segments, between saves, 150 miles away from one another, so this really leans toward 'It's about that multicolored polygon layer'. To me, it seems Waze doesn't know 'how far too far is' unless there's a polygon to check against.
Notes:
* Segments in this newly created city were touched on 11/23, after the newest tile update of 11/22. https://www.waze.com/editor/?zoom=3&lat ... FFTFTTTTFT
* Its polygon shape is visible in the multicolor layer, but not in the gray and 'City is here' layers of Livemap or clients, so it's a test case where the city exists in WME but not in the live client.
* If I try to add Rosewood a sufficiently far enough distance away from this location, I get the 'too far away' error.
* There was a WME map tile update less than 24 hours ago, which I know because another tiny city that had a small footprint got larger overnight based on edits I'd done yesterday.
** This is, of course, assuming Waze fixes the 'Too far from city isn't checked against alt streetnames as well as the primary' issue.