Kugelblitz 1.2.1

2026-11-11 · Build 34

New

Info: Roads, railways, rivers, lines of public transport, hiking and cycle routes, cable cars, ferries, power lines and city walls can be clicked too. Info gives their name, their number and what OpenStreetMap says of them, such as the speed limit, lanes, gauge, power supply or voltage, with “All Tags”. The line under the pointer lights up softly, the selected one more strongly, as the map draws it, a road or railway on its whole length. Info shows on top what anyone wants to know, values by name rather than in OpenStreetMap’s words, such as “Concrete” for “concrete”; roof, materials and other details, source, id and the link to OpenStreetMap stand at the bottom under “Data”. A click on the line also selects your own ways and the routes of the missions.
Moon: Close to the six Apollo landing sites the terrain comes from the LROC team's elevation models, with a height every 2 m (Apollo 17: 5 m) instead of every 59 m. Kugelblitz loads only the strips of them you look at.
Moon: Under “Missions”, “Routes” shows the ways of the astronauts of Apollo 11, 12 and 14 with the time of each place, to play in Info like the rovers on Mars, and the drives of Apollo 17’s lunar rover. With an astronaut selected, Info says what he was doing.
My Places: Aerial images from your own services and GeoTIFFs fade out softly towards the edge of their data, as the countries’ aerial images do. Where a map service names the date of its flight on its layer, it stands in “View Point and Camera” under “Taken At”.
Help: A new page “Keyboard Shortcuts” lists every shortcut of the menus. Links in the help show examples right on the globe, such as the Matterhorn in “First steps”.
My Places: The information of an area gives its surface area, measured on the celestial body it lies on, holes taken away.
Info: for buildings from OpenStreetMap the “Findings” name what is incomplete, unclear or contradictory in their data, such as an estimated height or a missing address; “Findings” and “All Tags” stay open when you move to the next object.
Map: Airfields show their runways and taxiways as areas on the road map and the topographic map, along with heliports, helipads and terminals. The runways carry their designators at their ends, and close up all their markings as ICAO prescribes them: on the road map and on the image map. Runways, taxiways, terminals and helipads come with “Buildings”; there is no separate “Runways” switch any more, and “Airports” shows the airfields as places.

Improved

Search: On the moon, Mars, Mercury, Ceres and Vesta the search now finds every name, even when its layer is switched off, such as “Perseverance” without “Landing Sites”. Choosing one switches its layer on.
Mars: You now play a mission in the window “Info”: a click on its rover, on Ingenuity or on its landing site shows it with operator, landing, sol and distance driven, and below it playing and “Follow View”. The sidebar keeps only the switch “Routes”.
Lengths: The length of a way in “My Places” and while playing it, the “Length of Ways” in the Library and the distance in the search are now measured on the earth’s ellipsoid instead of a sphere, up to half a percent more exact; Berlin–Hamburg is 255.95 instead of 255.23 km. On the Moon, Mars and the other bodies nothing changes.
My Places: Kugelblitz starts faster with many places of your own; they appear a moment after the globe, until then “My Places” shows “Loading…”.
Buildings: sheds and shelters that OpenStreetMap maps with at least one open side no longer float as a roof above the ground, they stand with walls of boards; pitched roofs without a storey in them are no longer flat, and heights in feet and inches or with a comma count.
Buildings: roofs lie as they are mapped: the ridge across the way the roof faces, on square houses too, skillions as steep as their pitch, roofs of several shapes at the mapped height. Kugelblitz also recognises roof shapes in other keys and misspelt ones.
Buildings: where only some parts of a building are mapped on their own, such as a tower or a dome, the rest of the building now stands too, such as a church's nave or the Berlin Palace around its dome; parts without a height lie at their building's height.
Buildings: where OpenStreetMap gives a period, a decade or a century as the year of construction, such as “1976..1991”, “1960s” or “C18”, the building stands in the past from the year by which it stood at the latest, instead of always; parts with years of their own, such as a tower built later, stand by them. “Info” gives the years of construction and demolition as they are entered.
Overview map: On the road map and the topographic map it shows that map itself, with its colours, its relief and the sea floor, instead of the satellite image; in the atlas the two hemispheres do too.
Map: On the road map and the topographic map, tidal flats and what else lies between the tides, sand, shingle and rock, lie over the sea instead of under it. Cliffs, banks and embankments show the side that falls away with small ticks.

Fixed

Mars: A rover's dot sits on its route also from close by and seen at a slant, instead of floating two metres above it beside the line; so does the dot at the head of a way in My Places during playback.
My Places: A planned route from SkyDemon (GPX) no longer counts as a flown way: it lies on the terrain instead of being strung with a curtain at the ground height of its waypoints.
Buildings: More mapped colours and materials show, such as brick, darkbrown, anthracite or rgb(…) as a colour and masonry, EPDM or Beton as a material.
Search: A house with several house numbers, such as “1,3”, is found under each of them; “Street 13” no longer finds “1-3” or “1,3”.
Map: The name in your language also stands beside a local name it is only part of, such as “Frankfurt” beside “Frankfurt am Main”.
Buildings: A building round a courtyard that the edge of one of the map’s tiles runs across no longer fills its courtyard with a wide bar.
Buildings: Courtyards stay open, several side by side as in the Paul-Löbe-Haus too, and those touching the outer wall in a point; flat roofs of narrow or many-stepped buildings no longer reach beyond their walls, and roofs follow blocks that bend along their street.
Buildings: Pyramidal roofs over L- or U-shaped footprints no longer span the courtyard, they become hipped roofs along the wings; building parts that take up nearly the whole building no longer flicker with its roof, as at the Paul-Löbe-Haus; gabled and hipped roofs run on across the edges of the map’s tiles instead of breaking there.