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It depends on the application, but I don't think they're necessarily larger in size. I believe the format is quite compressed (Mapbox Vector Tile/MVT, which I b
by durkie 6y ago
It depends on the application, but I don't think they're necessarily larger in size. I believe the format is quite compressed (Mapbox Vector Tile/MVT, which I believe is a variant of protocol buffers).
Many vector tile encoders have wide flexibility in geometry simplification/removal depending on zoom layer and this helps big time with tile size. I find them to be quite nice in lower bandwidth situations because you can overzoom them and still have them look good: if you zoom in and the tiles for the next zoom level haven't loaded, the vector geometry is still able to look decent, rather than pixellated like a raster tile.
- jokoon 6y agoCompressed? Are you saying decompression is done with JS?
- nbadg 6y agoYou're mixing up the formats slightly: MVT is sqlite with a particular schema; OSM raw data is PBF with a particular schema.
- durkie 6y agoIsn't mbtiles sqlite?
- nbadg 6y agoIt might be that pbfs are stored inside sqlite? The whole thing is really incredibly confusing to be honest. What I can tell you is that my vector slippymap XHR is requesting .pbf files, so that would definitely imply protobuffers as the wire format. Ultimately that's using t-rex and mapbox-gl.js, so... not sure if there's something intermediate. But the mapbox docs say sqlite? I'm just very confused now.
- maxerickson 6y agohttps://docs.mapbox.com/vector-tiles/specification/ https://docs.mapbox.com/vector-tiles/specification/
- nbadg 6y agoYep, versus https://docs.mapbox.com/help/glossary/mbtiles/ https://docs.mapbox.com/help/glossary/mbtiles/ -- I had them backwards. My confusion might have been because of the name similarities (mbtiles vs mvt), which took me 3 tries to even just type correctly.