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Farewell, Google Maps

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Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#441

Post by linsomniac »

coderesearch wrote: post #436
lxtx wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also prerender the tiles on a powerful machine and host them on a cheap instance (assuming you don't need very large regions). A while ago I created an OSM server ( https://github.com/seemk/TileSweep ) to do this for me, you can select regions you want to render via a polygon and you get a SQLite database of the tiles. It can also run as an alternative for mod_tile + renderd. I rendered all of Estonia from zo…

* How is the workflow for updating OSM data with this project? * What is the recommended procedure for backup + restore? I find a lot of projects in this space make you go through an manual copy-paste setup process like if it was a one-time thing - it is not - updating OSM data is a crucial part in this process and should be part of it.

I haven't investigated updating of data using anything clever. I know the database load script can write out a list of tiles that need to be rerendered, which can be fed into the renderd process. Renderd has multiple priority channel so bulk renders are a lower priority than user views, so a live system can update the tilecache without much easier impact.

I haven't investigated it because we are probably moving to Vector tiles over the next month or two, and we don't need up to the minute map updates. On one of our sites, we have been rendering navteq tiles and we only get updates for those quarterly. It was only our public site that we were using Google Maps for.

Backup and restore we are just doing via normal backup programs. The tilecache is stored in meta tiles, which is a d duplicated set of 64 tiles in a single file. So we are only dealing with about a million files in a directory structure totaling 25 gigabytes.

If we needed to restore or update our tiles, we would probably just spin up a new box and rerun ansible to deploy it. I have it all encoded Within a Playbook.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#442

Post by linsomniac »

coderesearch wrote: post #431
linsomniac wrote: post #65

I'm just finishing spinning up OpenStreetMap servers in EC2 as one of the last stages of our testing, and they look great. We almost went with Mapbox, which is probably a pretty good alternative. But as part of that move I decided to try OSM tiles and I had them up and running in an afternoon via a docker image, created an Ansible role for deploying virtual machines that evening, and had tiles for our region built th…

Thank you very much, may I ask two questions: * what is the workflow to update the OSM data? * what is your recommendation for a good geocoder?

I answered your questions where you asked it elsewhere in this thread.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#443

Post by dankusmcmeme »

komali2 wrote: post #187
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This ArenaNet situation sounds interesting. Could you post a link to it? I don't see much in search results.

Here's a couple analyses: https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/12/17565218/arenanet-guild-w... https://www.polygon.com/2018/7/10/17550276/guild-wars-2-aren... https://www.pcgamer.com/fired-arenanet-dev-calls-dismissal-a... In short, a woman working at ArenaNet, the company running GuildWars2 (an MMORPG), posted a twitter thread about her thoughts on designing narratives in an MMO. A prominent (male) streamer of the game r…

The issue was entirely with her. How you can think "Really interesting thread to read! However, allow me to disagree slightly. I don't believe the issue lies in the MMORPG genre itself..." needs to be even more passive and supplicating is incredible

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#444

Post by dmortin »

Jerry2 wrote: post #433
dmortin wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get it why they ask for money from people who want to learn their platform. They should be happy more people want to develop for them and charge for actual API usage instead above the free quota.

You can do pretty much everything with free membership: free tools etc. If you want to sell stuff in the App Store, then you have to pay.

I don't want to sell anything in the App Store, I just want to display an Apple Mapkit JS Map on my website, but apparently I need a paid developer account for this too, which makes no sense.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#445

Post by Markoff »

from their map comparison seem OSM and Mapbox visually the best and also with the most information, often beating Goggle maps, reason i am using Maps.me in mobile, Gmaps outside US are almost always inferior to other maps

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#446

Post by yellowapple »

"If we maintained current monthly usage of both maps and Places (ie. location search), the cost of Google Maps would be multiple times higher than the total cost of all other infrastructure."

Well yeah. If Google Maps is the most important component in your infrastructure (seems to be, based on the rest of the article), then it'd be surprising for it to not be the most expensive.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#447

Post by jehlakj »

jhall1468 wrote: post #305
rurban wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the other mapping services will very soon adjust their prices also. It makes no sense to be 10x cheaper than Google when 2x cheaper does the same. I still have to understand openstreetmap mapping solutions. It's named open, not free, so I guess providing your own server with osm data would work. Only with FreeStreetMap the data would be infected also.

> But the other mapping services will very soon adjust their prices also. It makes no sense to be 10x cheaper than Google when 2x cheaper does the same. There's a great deal of competition and that generally results in a race to the bottom. The market leader just removed themselves from the market and the best way to capitalize is stay low and build your userbase. We won't see price changes by any of these companies.…

When you have a service that’s ten times cheaper than the best service, people start to raise eyebrows. They perceive it to be much worse. It isn’t always true, but it’s not uncommon either. I doubt companies are going to race to the bottom.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#448

Post by spapas82 »

linsomniac wrote: post #440
spapas82 wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vector tiles is interesting and they are actually supported by GeoServer http://docs.geoserver.org/stable/en/user/extensions/vectorti... . However I wasn't able yet to integrate them to my GeoServer installation. Has anybody else been able to try this?

We are looking at moving to Vector tiles after the deployment of openstreetmap raster tiles is completed. We need to look at the performance closely though because on some devices it was slower with Vector tiles. I think we still want to go that direction we just have to quantify some of the performance.

The difference between raster tiles and vector tiles is that in raster tiles the rendering (conversion to actual images) is done on your server (either when each tile is loaded for the first time or you may initialize a bunch of zoom levels for your area yourself; this may take hours to days depending on your area size) while for vector tiles you just send the descriptions/shapes and the inages are created on the client side. It is expected that the client performance won't be as good as with raster tiles and slow clients like mobile phones will struggle while trying to render the images.

One interesting idea would be to have both raster and vector tiles; then in your client side code you could detect if the client is a mobile device or a desktop pc (I am not sure if you can detect more things about how speedy the device would be) and serve the corresponding tileset (ie the vector tileset if the device is desktop or the raster one if it is mobile). This way you will definitely decrease the load on your server and most clients won't have performance problems!

In any case, the clients will get faster as the time passes so after some years vector tiles would probably be the norm because they have the huge advantage that it is very easy to style them on-the-fly in any way you like (while, to style raster images you need to re-create them all from scratch).

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#449

Post by spapas82 »

rmc wrote: post #432
gregknicholson wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it be possible to put Free map tiles in something like DAT or IPFS, to share the load? Kind of like Peertube, but for maps.

If you use vector tiles, and render them client side you could do this. For raster tiles, where you're storing images, there are too many images to do this practically. And then you need to think of how to do data updates. OSM updates minutely.

Data updates are not required for many applications. You probably don't want to be google maps! For example I haven't updated the OSM data for more than a year and I don't think that there are any problems with the data being stale. It all depends on the application of course.

One major advantage of not updating your data very often is that the tile-images won't need to be re-generated thus you save a lot of (CPU intensive) resources! I think that another commenter mentioned that he generated the tiles in a CPU intensive system and then just off-loaded the images to not-so-fast system for serving.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#450

Post by andygates »

rmc wrote: post #337
rurban wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the other mapping services will very soon adjust their prices also. It makes no sense to be 10x cheaper than Google when 2x cheaper does the same. I still have to understand openstreetmap mapping solutions. It's named open, not free, so I guess providing your own server with osm data would work. Only with FreeStreetMap the data would be infected also.

> I still have to understand openstreetmap mapping solutions. It's named open, not free, so I guess providing your own server with osm data would work. Only with FreeStreetMap the data would be infected also. I'm not sure what you mean with "free"/"open". The OSM licence has a share-alike part if you merge your own map data with OSM data. If you just have a map and put points on it, it'd be fine.

This. Services are invited to take a slurp of data and use it as they wish, and contribute back of they make changes. It's not uncommon for a service of a certain size to become a contributor. But there's no requirement: if all they use it for is lookups and tiles, go ahead, "fill yer boots".
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