Introducing Mapbox GL | Hacker News Reader

Introducing Mapbox GL

mapbox.com

230 pointsincanus7743 comments

>Maps render at a super high framerate

You might want to use a nice HTML5 video instead of a .gif, then. It didn't make for a good first impression.

Running the 5.2 MB .gif through Gfycat reduces the size to a 566kb .webm file, for example [1].

[1] http://www.gfycat.com/PartialBlissfulEarthworm#

I can halve the size of the GIF with a bit of lossy compression (https://pornel.net/lossygif http://compressor.io/compress), but a proper video codec or actual WebGL would be much better indeed.

Or an actual map, scripted to move.

Sure. Oh but wait, there is an actual map there!

Well, damn. I just spent five months writing a GLES iOS renderer for mapnik-vector-tiles as a master thesis project.

I said, "as far as we know, nothing like this has ever been done before". Good thing the presentation was last week I guess...

MapBox is hiring. https://www.mapbox.com/jobs/

Open-source it anyway! The more the merrier...

Will you open source it?

Unfortunately, not at this moment. It might be used in a commercial product.

You can still use open source commercially. Make it GPLv3 or something, if you wanna tie the hands of anyone who uses it

Hard coded compiler version?

    Could not find compiler set in environment variable CC:

    gcc-4.8.

I'm running gcc-4.9. I got it working by doing:

    ln -s /usr/bin/gcc ~/bin/gcc-4.8
    ln -s /usr/bin/g++ ~/bin/g++-4.8

I'm not saying this is good practice, but it works.

Also need to make sure python means python2.

Thanks for noting these issues. I've made a note about Python 2.x in the readme (https://github.com/mapbox/mapbox-gl-native/commit/ae7e3de61c...). As far as the compiler, g++-4.9 is fine to use. If you hit an error with it could you share the details in an issue? https://github.com/mapbox/mapbox-gl-native/issues

I had to change: #!/usr/bin/env python to: #!/usr/bin/env python2

in the python scripts to get it working under archlinux. If this works on the other platforms, that might be a good change.

From looking at the build code, you should be able to just set CC=gcc-4.9 and CXX=g++-4.9 in your environment.

This is a pretty standard practice and the reason that it's set to "gcc-4.8" rather than "gcc" by default is because it requires real C++11 support in order to compile.

I've wanted to write a GLES 2 map renderer for ages -- ever since I saw that the Apple Maps app on iOS uses MSAA for antialiasing (yuck!).

It's funny to see all the usual 2D suspects in the source (clipper, GLU tessellator). They used a distance-based edge shader for antialiasing, so it should look much better than MSAA.

I'm not sure why there's a bias factor of 2 in the "raster" fragment shader -- looks like it might have been added by accident. It's interesting that they use both the stencil and depth buffers for clipping -- I hope they do a write up on some of the techniques they developed!

> I'm not sure why there's a bias factor of 2 in the "raster" fragment shader -- looks like it might have been added by accident.

Yes, that was an accident. Thanks for noticing! We definitely have a lot of information to share about the process. Regarding clipping, we're not sure yet whether what we have right now is the best thing; there will certainly be improvements in that area.

This is really cool. It seems that instead of using mipmaps to generate a map, they are using a combination of curves and 2D shapes. This is very smart since the data is not only more compact but can also be visualised in a very fluid manner. The bottleneck is now the GPU instead of the data connection. Give me the ability to download a city's map on Android and I'm dropping google maps like a brick.

Yes, the data is fairly compact. Data for the entire world enough for rendering to zoom level 18 generally comes in under 35GB (give or take 10 GB depending on what features you need). If you need to got to zoom levels approaching ~18 then there is no way to do this with image tiles. Vector tiles are the more efficient way. More details on the encoding at https://github.com/mapbox/vector-tile-spec and the encoder at https://github.com/mapbox/mapnik-vector-tile

There's plenty of apps on Android that use downloaded maps.

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Android

Unfortunately AFAIK most of them are missing many of the things that makes Google maps useful. Real time traffic data, real time road closure data, updated public transportation schedules and closures, search by something other than address, ...

Also I believe online vector based maps teams found that vector map data was actually larger than tiled map data. I thought as you did lines = smaller but lines + colors + line weights + building outlines + elevation contours + street names + road direction info etc adds up were as jpeg tiles can be pretty lossy.

Google Maps also uses GPU-rendered vector geometry for their maps on Android (since 2010) and iPhone:

http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/16/google-maps-5-0-hits-andr...

Yes. Mapbox is 1) completely open source and 2) completely flexible design-wise.

The vector map demo on the page has a serious issue with street names not showing up until you zoom way in, so far in that you can't see the context of the street anymore.

I assume this is for performance purposes, but it makes the map feel much less usable than Apple Maps in my opinion.

For comparison:

Apple Maps: http://i.imgur.com/jqPHej2.png vs Mapbox Maps: http://i.imgur.com/rVH775b.png

You do realize that this 100% configurable by stylesheets? The entire point is, that their maps are stylable by the user (i.e. the app developer).

Of course. I've used Mapbox before and messed around with customizing the stylesheets. But the reality is that creating your own stylesheets is a level of effort and attention to detail that most projects/startups can't afford to take on, at least not at first.

The default stylesheets should look good and work well out of the box. Then if you have the time and manpower to customize them further great.

One of the design goals with GL was to support cascading styles, so you can start with the predefined world map and just provide deltas of the things you want to change. For example: "Hide the buildings, set the text font to X, swap the stacking order of layers A and B, and override the default park color to blue".

The problem being that I might not know this particular thing is configurable. They need better defaults.

I played around with the demo map and the scrolling was indeed super quick, along with zoom level changes. If they could do the same thing with WebGL so that we'd have vector maps in the browser (like Google maps) that would be awesome. The competition would be good for everyone.

If you're talking about the demo map in the blog post, you just played with the WebGL version :)

More details here would be great! Seems like a souped-up version of Leaflet.

Man I love the stuff that MapBox puts out. High quality.

Why dont publish the webgl version as an openstreetmap client? would be awesome

I'm confused, is there a WebGL version of the framework as well? It would be really great to have that!

That's the one I was referring to. It was really, really good! :)

Didn't believe the WebGL demo until I rotated (ctrl-drag). Hope it feels as good on a mobile browser.

Does anyone know if they are planning perspective (affine) transformation? Specifically, relief maps drawn at the correct (or exaggerated) elevation, with the labels still drawn upright?

Yes, eventually.

Is anyone else seeing duplicated and mirrored labels in the demo? http://i.imgur.com/998pDUR.png

This looks indeed odd. Can you please share more information about your computer, OS and browser?

I have the same issue, but it looks even worse: http://i.imgur.com/WJQcZp8.png

My user agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_8_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/35.0.1916.114 Safari/537.36

I'm running on 15'' macbook pro, OS X 10.8.5 on a 2.2GHZ i7, with 8GB of memory.

So this is only for iOS? Is there one for the web?

The demo is a version for the web.

It was only a matter of time before the mapping feature evolved yet again, glad to get a quick glimpse of this awesome technology.

Sooooo... where do I get the WebGL (demo on the page) version? I want that.

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