The other day, I was looking to embed a tile based world map without detailed zoom levels (up to z11-12) into an offline desktop application. I was surprised by the difficulty to achieve this. The source formats are really heavy (120GB+ for planet) and the tools either too slow and/or overly complex (for example requiring setting up a DB to import the data in). Most tools I found seemed to be for making maps for smaller areas. I ended giving up...

Maybe I've done it wrong. Would love some good pointers on this. Any simple ways to generate vector tiles for a world map up to zoom levels 11 or 12?