You are basically right. But your framing might be slightly off. The primary advantage in vector tiles for whoever is providing the map is not the small benefits of greater sharpness or flexibility in styling. It's the vast decrease in compute required. Maintaining the infrastructure to generate up to date raster tiles is a pretty serious undertaking.

I once spent a lot of time developing this very detailed style for planning cycle tours: https://stevebennett.me/2015/01/14/cycletour-org-a-better-ma...

I've tried a few times over the years to replicate it using vector tiles. It's pretty challenging to load enough detail into the tiles without hitting the size limits, and the default Mapbox tiles don't containing anything like enough information.

There are workarounds with vector tiles that raster tiles don't have though, like the ability to turn on/off different layers, while still retaining legibility (because labels can still be aware of what is underneath them).

Some of what is going on is that the software to generate continuously updated vector tiles has been the focus, rather than fleshing out a style that uses those tiles.

I built a fork of OpenrailwayMap (original at https://www.openrailwaymap.org, vector styles at https://openrailwaymap.fly.dev).

The style was built to match the look of the original raster tiles closely, although I added many more interactivity features in the vector variant.

Is is interesting from a style/tile design perspective that the performance tradeoffs choices become very different how and where the tiles are rendered. This is obvious, but it has effects on what is possible on the server / clients visually as well.

I agree with you wholeheartedly. I use a mix of OpenSteetMap and Google Maps to get around. I would love to use exclusively OSM, but it simply doesn't have as many places catalogued.

I can't describe how much more usable OSM maps are because of how many POIs they show. You get a very real sense of the physical place just by looking at the map. A park looks distinctly like a park. A hospital looks distinctly like a hospital.

Google Maps looks a lot better from the perspective of a graphic designer, sure. But I usually have to resort to cross-referencing the shape of streets/intersection to get my bearings. With GM everywhere looks like everywhere else.

I completely mirror your thoughts. I have spent a fair while trying to bend vector maps into being as good as openstreetmap.org's default style (which in my opinion is just Pure Bliss) and have not managed to find anything workable enough, where you can't notice the loss of detail within 2 minutes of playing with it.

Which is a real pity. I'm optimistic that someone will solve it eventually.

I agree with you, but I go one step further: I am disappointed by OSM raster tiles and especially Google's digital tiles because even they show barely enough information, if you compare them to old style printed street directories. I think they also have a tendency to avoid crowding by omitting important things in busy spaces and showing useless things in empty spaces, whereas the correct thing to do is to show the important things in the busy spaces precisely to indicate that they're busy spaces. And I think there are better things that can be done than just showing trivia if you consider the local area (e.g. a private tennis court might be better off not shown in especially if there's not a great density of mapped objects, but perhaps it's relevant at a resort).

But that's a lot of work, and whereas it's easy to add extra trivia to OSM it's much harder to add extra detail to tiles.

I've been successful with using https://maputnik.github.io/editor in the past for disabling lots of features, so I imagine it could do the opposite and enable all the layers and features you want to see on a vector map.

I'm a little surprised it's taken this long for OSM to get there, the basic technical pieces were available over a decade ago. I don't mean to complain about the free map service, it's excellent, and I recognize they focus more on the editing and data ownership. Serving is hard and expensive.

Mostly I wonder how much MapBox's dominance for a few years disrupted other efforts.

Yes and No.

No because the official OSM tile layer is heavily subsidized by Fastly (€720k last I checked) and rendering by AWS (€40k)

Yes because technically it would use fewer resources thus easier on AWS+Fastly and also easier to self-host

In last risk assessment I read closely(1) OSM noted "If we lost [Fastly] sponsorship, we would likely cut off all third-party access to the standard tile layer and run a small number of Varnish servers."

As I understand it, primary drivers for vectors was not cost more improving internationalization, generally enabling client-side rendering decisions, and driving a modern toolchain that would net multiple follow-on benefits

I'm a bit behind, there is more recent info available at (2)

1.https://operations.osmfoundation.org/2024/01/25/owg_budget.o... 2. https://osmfoundation.org/wiki/Finances

No, because you've been able to self host (or have somebody host them for you) vector tiles for a long time with very little effort, and yes that will somewhat offload processing to clients, and, more importantly allow many styling decisions to be made by the client (but not all).

Static or infrequently updated vector tiles can be generated from OSM data by a number of tools, but those most popular right now are https://github.com/systemed/tilemaker and https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler

The actual -new- thing is that the work Paul has done for the OSMF allows on the fly (aka in minutes) updates of the vector tiles. This is important for OSM contributors as a feedback mechanism and the main reason the OSMF operates the current raster tile service.

What is currently a bit out in the open is which usage restrictions will apply to to using the vector tile service as, just as with the raster tile service, the intent is not to compete with or replace third party services and a vector tile service could potentially do that.

Yes, vector tiles are much easier to self host.

You have for example https://protomaps.com/ or https://openmaptiles.org/ or https://versatiles.org/ (random order).

openfreemap.org creator here. Yes, with vector tiles you are basically hosting static files, the server has nothing to do, except HTTPS encryption. Even gzipping is already done in the tiles.

The whole point of vector tiles is that the rendering is local and controlled by a style configuration (except for the tile schema) that can be changed. So the brokenness you are seeing is either in the style or the library that is rendering the contents locally.

I'm not sure how the QGIS vector tile renderer works, but for the github demo page it would be easy to add the RTL text plugin to MapLibre to correctly handle the RTL text: https://maplibre.org/maplibre-gl-js/docs/examples/mapbox-gl-...

OpenFreeMap is not providing:

- search or geocoding

- route calculation, navigation or directions

- static image generation

- raster tile hosting

- satellite image hosting

- elevation lookup

- custom tile or dataset hosting

https://github.com/hyperknot/openfreemap?tab=readme-ov-file#...

Wow, this looks incredibly polished!

Is this based on the same vector tech stack at all, or is it a completely parallel development?

I hate it when city and street names disappear on Google Maps as you zoom in and out. Sometimes a street or business name only appears at one particular zoom level and not higher or lower. Just show the name of every street damnit. I don't care about crowding. Standing at an intersection staring at an unlabelled map is a useless map.

The starting case is anyway automatic positioning of the labels.

Even on the raster tiles that have been in use for years.

Why would you expect the layout algorithm to be significantly different?

Large cities already contain the name in many languages. See Paris for example: https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/71525

The usefulness of being able to switch the language depends on the availability of translations of course. It might give editors an incentive to add more translations for place names.

The tile schema being used for the current testing (shortbread) doesn't support many languages, but they I think those working on this want to support them once the bugs are worked out.

For an example of how this might look see e.g. https://americanamap.org which uses OSM data, but doesn't aim to be near live like the tiles this thread is about.

No but you could fetch tiles with only the text you need to patch the tiles you already have.

Both apps mainly use downloaded/"offline" preprocessed map data in their own formats.

MVT format vector tiles are not remotely suitable for navigation or search (not ruling out that something could be hobbled together, but it would be a bit of a stretch).

There can be no one ultimate map app because use cases differ. For example, OSMAnd has many power-user features that are very useful for people who also contribute to OSM, but would only clutter the interface of an app for normies.

At the very least I hope it means they can share map tiles between them so I don't have to use gigabytes of space on the same map

There is Organic Maps already.

How so?

I went looking for the Marble app on Android and it's not in the Play store or on f-droid. The link to the Play store from the website is a 404. Did they abandon it?

I think what he implies is that he's hosting it locally on that, in which case the high specs are a weird flex because the demo map runs like absolute molasses for me.

Maybe it's high load or the guy doesn't have much upload speed, but it showcases that overzooming low level tiles renders really bad square lines when the high detail layers refuse to download.

Possibly, but why would you want to do this client side? This seems like the type of operation that makes much more sense in "OSM space", not vector graphics space.

Sure you could .... but to find something you would need to have the tile in question so you would need to calculate the tile to retrieve, and then find the object at the location (which is roughly equivalent to rendering the tile).

Doesn't seem to make sense when you can just run a nominatim or photon instance locally. Not to mention that currently you would typically have to add additional address data to the mix to get the quality of commercial geocoding services which makes the doing it via tiles even less attractive.

Yes, they could. You can attach whatever metadata you want to a vector tile feature.

... it doesn't?

One of the downsides of MVTs and the typical max zoom level of 14 is that that they do require more local resources than simply rendering a 256x256 bitmap.

For OSM the question is naturally would a complete migration (aka turning off raster tile support) exclude any noticeable number of people from contributing.

But right now that decision is still a long way off, the vector tile service hasn't even been integrated in osm.org yet.

Something like https://github.com/maptiler/tileserver-gl can serve raster tiles from a vector tile dataset

Apple’s MapKit most definitely supports vector tiles, because you are given a CGContext to draw with. You just have to implement the MVT spec (it’s small)

I am absolutely amazed that Apple don't support this yet. I had thought mapping was a competitive advantage for them...

See https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/vector-tiles-on-osmf-h...

Sorry, I just added a link to a live demo in the post: https://pnorman.github.io/tilekiln-shortbread-demo/

Mapbox Vector Tiles are not SVG, its is similar to geoJSON but encoded in protobuf. The renderer is going to typically be WebGL based in the browser written in javascript.

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Vector_tiles

https://maplibre.org/maplibre-gl-js/docs/

I wish they were SVG, that would make rendering them less of a headache.

There is still no good library which takes in a MVT tile and spits out the appropriate PNG or JPEG for rendering in via a tile base mapping engine. There is still no good cross platform mapping engine that can render vector tiles in a way that is easy to consume. There are certainly engines on specific platforms, but unless we use something like Leaflet or OpenLayers it is hard to make it work with native APIs on, say Windows, MacOs, Linux, iOS or Android without needing to adding a whole browser engine on top of your app.

So while showcasing the brand-new vector tiles, they accidentally also showcased a pretty significant bug? Should have picked some city with non-latin script that's written left-to-right... er, maybe Athens?

Yeah, I’m curious if that problem is baked into the SVG, or if the renderer has a “don’t screw up Arabic” option that’s disabled by default. You’d think nobody would design software that way, but Photoshop has that option, and it really is turned off by default!

We don't offer 2x raster tiles because we simply don't have the resources to do it while keeping the tiles minutely updated and open access. We serve around 60k req/sec on a tiny donation backed budget.

The raster tiles are primarily for our OSM mappers to see their map changes rendered quickly to improve the feedback loop.

Raster tiles hosted at tile.openstreetmap.org are not intended for widespread production use, they’re principally for mapper feedback. If you have a business need for something that doesn’t look “amateur” you should arguably be using a third party OSM-based service or hosting your own tiles.

> No one uses 1080p displays anymore.

I live in a bubble, the post.

Funnily enough I have 3x 1080p monitors in front of me. Maybe I am "no one". :)