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Vector Tiles are deployed on OpenStreetMap.org

blog.openstreetmap.org

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Re: Vector Tiles are deployed on OpenStreetMap.org

#61

Post by showcaseearth »

severak_cz wrote: post #40

Oh but that default style for Shortbread is so ugly! No contrast, missing details and lots of information lost. Hopefully it's vector tiles and information are there (I checked in Maputik) so it's possible to create my own style (which I will definitely try).

The lack of boundaries below national level is off-putting. Both the style and the tile spec itself seem to need a lot of refinement... highways look like a patchwork at low zoom. I had also thought shortbread excluded a lot of POI types, but maybe I need to review again.

But that's not to diminish the accomplishment overall here for the OSM page itself– this is an awesome step forward!

Re: Vector Tiles are deployed on OpenStreetMap.org

#62

Post by wiredfool »

timeon wrote: post #46
lutoma wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I'm quite happy that these tiles cut down on the clutter in the original OSM tiles. It made it very hard for me to actually use them for navigation because there was just so much stuff everywhere. For example the old tiles displayed rail tracks extremely prominently, which just aren't relevant 99% of the time even when traveling by train. In the vector tiles they're much more muted and thinner.

Yes but this one only highlights motorways which are used usually just for long distance drives.

The nice thing is, that's just a style, not a property of the tiles. So if you want to alter the rendering, it's "just" a change to the style of that layer/attribute.

Re: Vector Tiles are deployed on OpenStreetMap.org

#63

Post by wiredfool »

showcaseearth wrote: post #61
severak_cz wrote: post #40

Oh but that default style for Shortbread is so ugly! No contrast, missing details and lots of information lost. Hopefully it's vector tiles and information are there (I checked in Maputik) so it's possible to create my own style (which I will definitely try).

The lack of boundaries below national level is off-putting. Both the style and the tile spec itself seem to need a lot of refinement... highways look like a patchwork at low zoom. I had also thought shortbread excluded a lot of POI types, but maybe I need to review again. But that's not to diminish the accomplishment overall here for the OSM page itself– this is an awesome step forward!

OSM has always overdone boundaries in my opinion, the raster tiles show national/international waters and electoral districts, which are of limited use for most purposes.

Re: Vector Tiles are deployed on OpenStreetMap.org

#64

Post by maelito »

mourner wrote: post #56
maelito wrote: post #9

In case you wonder how much time / resources it takes to generate vector tiles, I'm running benchmarks with Tilemaker here for https://cartes.app https://github.com/systemed/tilemaker/issues/839

Also worth checking out https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler , which maybe a bit less mature, but is much faster than Tilemaker.

Is it ? The benchmark section says 42 m for a 128 Gb machine with 64 CPU.

Re: Vector Tiles are deployed on OpenStreetMap.org

#65

Post by perrygeo »

To everyone with complaints about the new "Shortbread" styling, I agree that it's not perfect but that's kinda missing the point. The real story is that vector tiles have the styling applied client-side so anyone can tweak the look with a little javascript.

The prior raster tiles have the style baked in; if you want a new look, you need to generate a new image. So each map publisher ends up running their own data and server infrastructure just to tweak the style.

The vector tile approach means a single (cacheable) asset can be used in many different maps. Huge win. If you don't like the style, you can make your own without having to literally download the planet.

Re: Vector Tiles are deployed on OpenStreetMap.org

#66

Post by ikawe »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #38
dolmen wrote: post #33

Many important details are not visible anymore: - gates on private pathways - shop names

The choices are tough, also in details: Which shops to show in busy areas at which zoom level? But mind: openstreetmap.org is ment as a developer site, for developers to see their changes quickly. The official idea is that other people should take the data and do "nice" things elsewhere. But of course reality is that users want to use openstreetmap.org as alternative to Google maps ...

Official? I've never heard this as official doctrine. Can you point me to anything official?

I'd love to see OpenStreetMap.org be more directly useful to more people, rather than only as a "developer site".

Re: Vector Tiles are deployed on OpenStreetMap.org

#67

Post by severak »

stevage wrote: post #25
orblivion wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think there's an additional benefit. Traditional process is: OSM Database -> PNGs -> Your screen The first arrow decides what data to pull out and how to draw it. The new process is: OSM Database -> Vector Tiles -> Your Screen The first arrow decides what data to pull out. The second arrow decides how to draw it. So given your vector tiles, you can choose and tweak t…

The enormous difference from an infrastructure standpoint is where the arrows are happening and how much effort it is. > OSM Database -> PNGs This is a tile rendering farm. It takes a lot of compute power and has to be redone every time a style changes or data changes. > OSM Database -> Vector Tiles This is a relatively cheap data extraction process. It has to be redone when data changes. > PNGs -> Your screen This i…

Rendering of Vector Tiles is not that hard as all the geometry is already processed, polygons assembled and data sorted. If you have good source of vector tiles renderer itself can be relatively dumb.

I was able to implement relatively straightforward renderer in Nim language[0].

I have encountered only three hard parts:

- rendering map labels on paths (this is really hard!) - how to render labels not to be clipped by tile boundary (I had some ideas but did not implemented it yet) - collisions between labels and symbols

[0] - https://github.com/severak/lunarender3/

Re: Vector Tiles are deployed on OpenStreetMap.org

#68

Post by Piskvorrr »

ikawe wrote: post #66
johannes1234321 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The choices are tough, also in details: Which shops to show in busy areas at which zoom level? But mind: openstreetmap.org is ment as a developer site, for developers to see their changes quickly. The official idea is that other people should take the data and do "nice" things elsewhere. But of course reality is that users want to use openstreetmap.org as alternative to Google maps ...

Official? I've never heard this as official doctrine. Can you point me to anything official? I'd love to see OpenStreetMap.org be more directly useful to more people, rather than only as a "developer site".

Well that's a bit of a balancing act, isn't it? "Why isn't this feature on the site, it would be more useful to me; also, that feature is annoying and useless to me" - says literally everyone.

Thus, we get a built-in editor (less friction, yay/too rudimentary, boo) and popups (OSM events, yay/Popups are now everywhere, boo). And endless discussions on "this should be more/less prominent."

I don't think there's any official edict, but the approach "I don't like this and I'll make my own version" is at the very least workable (as opposed to, say, Google Maps).

Re: Vector Tiles are deployed on OpenStreetMap.org

#69

Post by gregoriol »

hopelite wrote: post #51
gregoriol wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed almost everyone except Apple's MapKit library for in-app native maps integration is using vector these days.

Could you explain why you say that? My understanding is that rasterized tiles are only a graceful degradation when necessary in MapKit, while vector is default, as the behavior and experience would indicate.

I was referring to using custom vector tiles like the ones in the post with MapKit, not Apple's tiles. The MKTileOverlay is the only way to do it and it only supports bitmap tiles.

Re: Vector Tiles are deployed on OpenStreetMap.org

#70

Post by tppiotrowski »

colkassad wrote: post #54
sp8962 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To answer the question: somebody needs to do the initial work and it's a further moving part that needs to be kept running (as the other responses point out such a distribution would likely use PMTiles as a container format). Given the current finances and staffing of the OSMF likely not top priority.

But they've done the work and are serving them now, just wondering why they don't just dump a copy on AWS. Thanks for answering!

Protomaps does this already. They do a planet build each day and offer a download for free:

https://docs.protomaps.com/basemaps/downloads

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