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Comment by tppiotrowski | Hacker News Reader

Super excited for your project. I have been using map tiles from Mapbox, MapTiler, OSM Buildings for my project and am coming to the point that I need to merge elevation data with building height data in order to cast realistic shadows across the earth. Unfortunately elevation data and building data come from two different tile sets from two different tile providers and it's a lot of download/processing overhead to merge the two data sources. I need to make my own tiles!

I spent part of today on the OSM wiki trying to wrap my head around Mapnik, how tiles are generated, how I am going to host this cheaply because my project is non-commercial, and then the HN gods smiled on me. Thank you for taking this on and I'm coming along for this journey!

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I’ve had success using tippecanoe to generate mvt tiles from geojson sources, which in turn came from various sources (osm and otherwise) from QGIS. I didn’t look into this project too much but it appears to be bundling mvt tiles into a single file? Either way, straight up mvt tiles are easy to generate and can be easily hosted statically on any web server/s3 bucket/cdn.

Thanks for sharing your experience. Much of this vocabulary is still foreign to me but you've given me some the relevant keywords to Google.

One of the main challenges when entering a highly specialised field is finding the vocabulary to express yourself.

I'd also recommend having a look at https://openmaptiles.org/. They have workflows and editors for working with MVT and Maplibre. You can combine a base map from maplibre with other sources using Openlayers [0]

[0]: https://openlayers.org/en/latest/examples/mapbox-layer.html

If you need to create your own tiles, I'm not sure how this changes anything. I can't seem to find how one would go about generating one's own tiles for this platform in their documentation. Did you find something to that effect in it?

Author here. You should be able to first download OpenStreetMap tiles in PMTiles format (http://github.com/protomaps/pmtiles) and then write out a new augmented tileset in the same format. It's a use case I want to have first-class support for, but the tooling doesn't exist yet.

> You should be able to first download OpenStreetMap tiles in PMTiles format

To elabore on my comment, I was more wondering about how I generate those tiles from non-tiled raw PBF country extracts on Geofabrik.

The tile generation from PBF (actually OSMX) is not one of the parts that is open source; for that task I would look at https://github.com/systemed/tilemaker or https://github.com/openmaptiles/openmaptiles

I've already known about those, but thank you anyway.

What kind of project can this tool be used for?

I think the author would explain best. Personally, I'm working on casting live earth shadows on a tiled map (link in HN profile) and lack an off-the-shelf tile set that contains all the data I need and in some cases the available tiles I use contain more data than I want. Also, the tiles cost $$$ for each tile load.

So long-term I am looking into generating and hosting my own map tiles.

Depending on your needs, tilemaker (https://github.com/systemed/tilemaker) may be the least painful way for generating tiles from OSM data with modifications to it. Or at least it seems to be the least painful way of doing that that I've found so far. The input data is manipulated by Lua code that you provide, and some reasonable default configuration for it exists. Your custom Lua code could pull additional information from other information sources should you wish to do so.

Right now it's best suited for mapping applications focused on some part of the world - neighborhood, city, country scale - especially ones that might avoid using a hosted service. Think visualization projects built for clients, newspaper site interactives, etc.

Edit: replied to the wrong comment

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