tippecanoe VS planetiler

This is awesome. Such a great use case for nix.

I do a lot of geospatial processing in the cloud and I've been using Tippecanoe a lot to create vector tiles. It pairs well with PM Tiles for storing on the cloud. It seriously increases the web app performance for massive data sets. I queue these up with ECS tasks to process our json/csv/parquet input and create optimize vector tile outputs.

https://github.com/felt/tippecanoe

https://github.com/protomaps/PMTiles

Tippecanoe would be a great addition to your nix packages. I've been thinking more and more about how Nix could fit into this pipeline.

Great work!

I'm the author of a few of the tools mentioned in this post!

A convenient new development is instead of using tippecanoe -> go-pmtiles to create PMTiles archives, you can now output .pmtiles directly:

tippecanoe -o bks2.pmtiles mainroad.geojson ...

This is available in Tippecanoe (https://github.com/felt/tippecanoe) v2.17 and later.

Thanks to Felt (https://felt.com) for supporting this open source work.

tippecanoe

Things I have tried so far: - Just using native vector tile conversion as it involves feature simplification. Doesn't work since smallest feature just disappear, resulting in blank regions instead of "averaged" regions. - Using tippecanoe's built in features to drop/merge in densest zones. Results are disappointing because of unexpected (and too big) differences between each zoom level. - Rasterizing the map, sieving, then vectorizing with smoothing. Doesn't work because pixel information are mixed. I would need a way to rasterize while preserving the land-cover category (with some kind of majority filter ?), but haven't find a way to do this with any QGis built-in or plugin feature.

Take a look at Tippecanoe, which is under active development again[0]. The original developer, Erica Fischer (who is wonderful to work with), has a fork[1] where new work is happening.

[0] https://felt.com/blog/erica-fischer-tippecanoe-at-felt

[1] https://github.com/felt/tippecanoe

https://felt.com/blog/erica-fischer-tippecanoe-at-felt

Worth mentioning this project (https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler) that lets you create osm mbtiles and pmtiles pretty easy!

For a self-hosted vector tile stack you can have a look into https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler I found it very easy to get started and when you know the other stacks it is also very fast to create these vector tiles even for planet-scale.

(note, that I'm not affiliated with them, but they use some source code from us for the efficient import and also contributed to GraphHopper, but this did not influence my experience ;) )

> I wonder why so many seem to be moving away from raster tiles to vector data.

The flexibility of styling. And you can easily serve customers that need different default languages. This makes maps also more accessible for countries without Latin alphabet.

I used https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler and https://download.geofabrik.de, maybe it helps.

I spent a while optimizing sqlite inserts for planetiler, this is what I came up with:

https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler/blob/db0ab02263baaa...

It batches inserts into bulk statements and is able to do writes in the 500k+ per second range, and reads are 300-400k/s using those settings.

Checkout https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler.

Super easy way to generate a MBTiles, which you can then serve directly, or further convert to PMTiles, which can be used to host vector tiles for client-side rendering using MapLibre (or other renderers).

Raster tiles are a lot harder because you have to generate them on the server, and that's a lot more resource intensive.

I built planetiler (https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler) for this purpose. The output up to z14 is ~80gb and depending on how big of a machine you have it takes from 30 minutes up to a few hours - no DB required, just java or docker. If you are only going to z11-12, it should be quite a bit faster/smaller.

Brandon from Protomaps is also helping add pmtiles output natively to planetiler, so you won't need a conversion step afterwards!

It's not raster directly, but you could use planetiler ( https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler ) to build a full planet vector map . Then you could use something like TileServer-GL to server the vector map with a style. TileServer-gl ( https://github.com/maptiler/tileserver-gl) would provide a raster source that displays in the style you set on your vector map.

I recently left Twitter after 9 years, most recently serving as tech lead for the knowledge graph group (was 45 people). I helped apply the KG to drive a large portion of Twitter’s revenue and new product launches. In my spare time I do data visualization and web mapping, most recently https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler