tippecanoe VS TileServer GL

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

I've been using TileServer GL for a while and it looks like there is support for pmtiles coming soon.

https://github.com/maptiler/tileserver-gl/pull/1009

Firstly, I just want to say thanks for the reply, but more so thanks for your work, its moving opensource mapping forward.

In my work we are looking at switching from mbtiles hosted with tilserver-gl(https://github.com/maptiler/tileserver-gl) to pmtiles to remove a server process. But we we self host already and we are already using maplibre-gl 2.

I can see why the implementation in the blog post would be better for high traffic deployments (ours isn't). It also points out to me I don't understand how a CDN would handle range request for hosting the pmtiles file directly, it probably doesn't?

As far as the mapbox stuff,in my mind, pmtiles is a direct competitor (successor) to the mbtiles format, which was a revolution in comparison to everything that came before it. A successor I welcome because it makes it even easier for me as a developer to self host and not be dependent on a SaaS to run my maps.

The modern opensource map stack wouldn't exist without mapbox and I'm personally grateful to them for that. Most people who use pmtiles will use mapbox's opensource style spec to style them, and descendants of their open source code to render them. But as a developer now its an obvious choice to not use their services after years of using them.

However I'm not doing high traffic stuff and they never made much money off me anyway.

https://github.com/maptiler/tileserver-gl makes it really easy. I have a pretty simple pipeline set up to download an OSM extract, convert it to MBTiles, host it in CloudFlare, and render raster tiles with this software.

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.

You could host something like tileserver-gl (https://github.com/maptiler/tileserver-gl) and use the pre-generated vector tiles from https://archive.org/details/osm-vector-mbtiles Add some map styles and you have your own offline map service. Here are some good starters for styles: https://github.com/openmaptiles/osm-bright-gl-style

This server is intended to be a tile server, taking vector data and rendering it to rasterized tile images via tileserver-gl (which uses OpenGL)