5 ms·

i tried to write my own map tile renderer, in go, for one airbnb-like project where using the google maps or any other provider would cost me an arm and a leg a

by hknmtt 4y ago

i tried to write my own map tile renderer, in go, for one airbnb-like project where using the google maps or any other provider would cost me an arm and a leg and after experiencing the tag system in OSM i'd rather cut said arm and said leg myself off...with a rusty saw.

vidarh 4y ago
I worked on a bootstrapped startup where we needed to render hundreds of layers of maps years ago. We didn't get a market fit, but the rendering pipeline worked well and included support for parallelising it out over multiple servers as we needed to be able to rapidly turn around customer-uploaded layers. It was massively painful to get there, but I'm tempted to dig out the code again and see if I can get it running and how it'd perform on a more modern machine (this was 10+ years ago).
- hknmtt 4y ago
  the rendering itself was easy. the problem i had was actually the style of the rendering. because you have to use the node/way tags to determine what is what and how to render it(style). not only that but also order of rendering. that in itself is not an issue, but the tag system is. which everything(logic) is built on. hence why i gave up on it. i still have the code, it works, it renders roads and whatnot but it is impossible to write some useful style for it beyond utter basics. the only thing i struggled with for a while was tile edges where renderer would close the paths, making continuous lines broken on every edge. once i figured out to render a but further beyond the edge(which won't be actually rendered on the image) i was fine. it is really not hard to do, couple of hours at most. but again, the tag system makes this useless. it can be done but i realized that life is way too short for this and moved on. also i found there are other project that handle this that you can self-host nowadays so it lost it's financial potential anyway. i just prefer to use my own code.
Doctor_Fegg 4y ago
If you think tags are the hard bit that suggests you didn't get as far as looking at multipolygons...

by hknmtt 4y ago

vidarh 4y ago

I worked on a bootstrapped startup where we needed to render hundreds of layers of maps years ago. We didn't get a market fit, but the rendering pipeline worked well and included support for parallelising it out over multiple servers as we needed to be able to rapidly turn around customer-uploaded layers. It was massively painful to get there, but I'm tempted to dig out the code again and see if I can get it running and how it'd perform on a more modern machine (this was 10+ years ago).

hknmtt 4y ago
the rendering itself was easy. the problem i had was actually the style of the rendering. because you have to use the node/way tags to determine what is what and how to render it(style). not only that but also order of rendering. that in itself is not an issue, but the tag system is. which everything(logic) is built on. hence why i gave up on it. i still have the code, it works, it renders roads and whatnot but it is impossible to write some useful style for it beyond utter basics. the only thing i struggled with for a while was tile edges where renderer would close the paths, making continuous lines broken on every edge. once i figured out to render a but further beyond the edge(which won't be actually rendered on the image) i was fine. it is really not hard to do, couple of hours at most. but again, the tag system makes this useless. it can be done but i realized that life is way too short for this and moved on. also i found there are other project that handle this that you can self-host nowadays so it lost it's financial potential anyway. i just prefer to use my own code.

Doctor_Fegg 4y ago

If you think tags are the hard bit that suggests you didn't get as far as looking at multipolygons...