Route planner with imported GPX not following route and distance wrong

meiersa78

Hi, I've been playing around with the route planner, but something is not right. I have made a screen recording that you can watch here.

I plan all my hikes with CalTopo and the route data (profile, elevation, length, etc.) is always very accurate.

So after importing the GPX that I exported from CalTopo, you can see that the route is correctly outlined and numbered from 1-99 (where does that come from?), but there are now several issues on the Windy route planner:

It says at the bottom left that the route is 19.7 km long. This is way off. CalTopo shows that it's 15.7 km. And the recorded track of the actual hike is about 17 km - and this was with several 'side quests' off route. So even including those, the length displayed in Windy is completely wrong.
The weirdest thing is what you can see on the screen recording. When I move the cursor along the graph at the bottom, you can see that the white blinking indicator on the map is moving in some very chaotic and random manner that makes zero sense. It always moves way off route and doesn't follow it at all.
But also, when I get to the right edge of that graph at the bottom, the small gray box above the cursor (vertical line) stops at 15 km - which would more or less correspond to the correct length of the planned route.

What is going on here? Thanks for checking and fixing this.

Nicole Dolezalova

@meiersa78 Hello, thank you for bringing this to our attention - I have forwarded this issue to my colleagues. Have a nice day, Niki

meiersa78

@Nicole-Dolezalova Hello, it's been more than 7 months now. Has this been investigated? Because it is definitely not fixed. I have just tried it again, please watch this screen recording here: https://kommodo.ai/recordings/LBoVKcphHSp4LCGRWvLG?onlyRecording=1

As described in the original post, I simply imported a small 13.48km gpx file exported from CalTopo into Windy. Same behavior. Windy somehow turns those 13.48km into 18km, and everything is just off.

You can see the white dots flying in and out from everywhere on the map when I simply drag the mouse over the route at the bottom. You can also see that the orange "elevation dot" is off. And the end is just at elevation zero, which are the additional 4.5km Windy adds for some reason.

Thanks for an update on this.

idefix37

@meiersa78
Have you tried to plot your own route, instead of using a GPX file from an app?
The issue may come from the GPX file itself.

meiersa78

@idefix37 I plotted that route myself in CalTopo and exported it as gpx. I can import that file anywhere in AlpineQuest, Google Earth, Gaia, Mapy, etc., and it's always correct. So I don't think the gpx is wrong. I can try creating routes in other apps and importing them into Windy. If it's going to be the same result, something with the import doesn't seem to work properly. I won't use Windy to plot routes because I've been using CalTopo for years and all my data is there. But I can definitely try to create gpx routes in other tools and import them to see what happens.

idefix37

@meiersa78
Why not try plotting a route directly in the route planner? To see if the behavior is different or not.
And what about importing a GPX route from an app other than the one you usually use? Just to test it.

meiersa78

@idefix37 Yes, I will test it and will report back here to hopefully narrow down where the issue comes from.

Suty

@meiersa78 Hi, do you have any update for us about your test?