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No. New clients use vector data, but even the web version will go back to bitmap tiles if your browser does not support WebGL, the GPU is slow or busy, etc. Th
by puzzle 9y ago
No. New clients use vector data, but even the web version will go back to bitmap tiles if your browser does not support WebGL, the GPU is slow or busy, etc.
There was a whole MapReduce (which Jeff Dean used for years in public talks to explain the concept), part of a larger pipeline, that converted the road and POI network into bitmap tiles. It didn't run by accident or maintain itself, so this is probably not a coincidence. :-)
Actually, with the push toward edits going live quickly and the styling/multilingual support in the Maps API, it's likely that a good chunk of tile traffic is rendered on the fly now, but the HTTP requests to the servers would look the same and there would still be enough demand for the stock tiles.
- jtolmar 9y agoEven on modern versions of Maps, South Korea uses bitmap tiles. On a phone, scroll so Pyongyang and Seoul are in the same viewport and observe what happens to them if you try to rotate the map.
- ReverseCold 9y agoFor anyone unwilling to open maps and check: the South Korean tiles are bitmaps (you see this because the city labels rotate along with the map in SK but not in NK). That's interesting though,why does South Korea use bitmaps?
- yongjik 9y agoSouth Korea has this brain-dead law that prohibits any map data on South Korea from being exported: the data must physically remain in a server located in South Korea. Obviously, this is a huge problem for Google, who wants to keep the world's map data in multiple data centers across the world. So... imagine what kind of horrible kludges some unfortunate developers had to write just to comply with that law.
- jacquesm 9y agoEvery time someone from outside of South Korea looks at it that map data is exported. But don't tell them.
- yongjik 9y agoI think the law distinguishes between an end-user accessing map data and transferring the whole data overseas. But as you pointed out, that's not really a meaningful distinction. Anybody who's interested in a particular place in Korea (be it CIA or North Korea) can simply visit map.naver.com or buy commercially available satellite photos.