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Mapbox GL for the Web

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11–20 of 40 posts

Re: Mapbox GL for the Web

#11

I'm just a little bit disturbed by the absence in some cases of the street names. Is this intentional ?

Doesn't look intentional. I've gotten drastically different street name coverage for the same area at the same zoom level depending on whether I got there by panning or zooming. And neither one includes names for the whole screen. Still a few kinks to work out?

http://i.imgur.com/DNBt4AM.png

It feels like the text pops in and out as large zones, and the zones are unloading themselves before the whole zone is offscreen, sometimes leaving large areas blank.

For reference, the upper image was produced by panning. The area on the right had been showing text, but it vanished as it got near the edge of the screen.

Re: Mapbox GL for the Web

#13
I'd love to hear a bit more about how you handle thick lines and anti-aliasing in WebGL.

Currently my approach is to make the line a little thicker and then apply the anti-aliasing in the frag shader. Similar to GPU Gems "Fast Prefiltered Lines." But it gets tricky with end caps, round joins, etc.

Re: Mapbox GL for the Web

#14

I'd love to hear a bit more about how you handle thick lines and anti-aliasing in WebGL. Currently my approach is to make the line a little thicker and then apply the anti-aliasing in the frag shader. Similar to GPU Gems "Fast Prefiltered Lines." But it gets tricky with end caps, round joins, etc.

We did a blog post on it: https://www.mapbox.com/blog/drawing-antialiased-lines/

Re: Mapbox GL for the Web

#15

I'm just a little bit disturbed by the absence in some cases of the street names. Is this intentional ?

Doesn't look intentional. I've gotten drastically different street name coverage for the same area at the same zoom level depending on whether I got there by panning or zooming. And neither one includes names for the whole screen. Still a few kinks to work out? http://i.imgur.com/DNBt4AM.png It feels like the text pops in and out as large zones, and the zones are unloading themselves before the whole zone is offscree…

This looks like a bug. I filed a ticket and we'll take a look. Thanks for the details!

https://github.com/mapbox/mapbox-gl-js/issues/652

Re: Mapbox GL for the Web

#16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't look intentional. I've gotten drastically different street name coverage for the same area at the same zoom level depending on whether I got there by panning or zooming. And neither one includes names for the whole screen. Still a few kinks to work out? http://i.imgur.com/DNBt4AM.png It feels like the text pops in and out as large zones, and the zones are unloading themselves before the whole zone is offscree…

This looks like a bug. I filed a ticket and we'll take a look. Thanks for the details! https://github.com/mapbox/mapbox-gl-js/issues/652

I'm running Firefox 32 Beta on Windows 8.1 with DPI scaling, in case that helps narrow it down. Tried to test it, but I don't think I can get FF to stop scaling without logging out and back in; quitting and rerunning it with the disable scaling box checked doesn't work. That's normally the first thing I look at for graphical glitches on here, though I have no idea how it affects WebGL.

Great job with this! Coming from Google Maps and similar, the smooth motion is mesmerizing, especially labels staying level as you rotate. And tile loading/pop-in is much quicker than what I get from Google.

Re: Mapbox GL for the Web

#17
post #12

OpenLayers 3 has GL ability if you're looking for something you can use locally http://ol3js.org/

The whole Mapbox GL stack is open source and can be used locally as well. It is complicated, but possible nevertheless.

Also, it's very different — with OL3, you just have GL rendering usual server-rendered image tiles with some simple vector data overlays, while Mapbox GL JS renders OSM vector data on the client.

Re: Mapbox GL for the Web

#18
This is crazy impressive. I'm still reading the source but so far what i see is really great already. Very concise and clean. I would love to see an embeddable C + portable ES2/CoreGL version of this.

Edit: Just found the native version. A bit heavy on dependencies but basically what I was asking for. :)

Re: Mapbox GL for the Web

#19
wow, VERY impressive. What you can do with that!!

I guess some of the old dusty GIS Enterprise Solutions, now _slowly_ have to start worrying about competition in such form (I know you can't compare it to a full Featured GIS, as a map is only a component of many many things that are required to be usefull). Current solutions are way behind and the moment when it comes to the presentation and manipulation of data (imho). They will have to up their game significantly to stay relevant.

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