83 karma · joined May 18, 2024
That's not to say that maputnik isn't great; it is! It's an awesome frontend to the complex style files.
The article has screenshots that very much demonstrate this difference. The first screenshot has, for example, a lot of POIs (statues, shops, theaters, viewpoints), highways that are different when they are bridges, different colors for grass vs parks, different line widths for different highways, sports fields, building and neighbourhood names, arrows denoting one-way streets, building parts, stairs, trees, and a lot more.
The second screenshot has none of that, aside from a single trolly station and a single street name (which is also rendered incorrectly).
I've tried a lot of vector styles (all openmaptiles styles, the base protomaps styles, all mapbox styles) and generators (protomaps, openmaptiles, mapbox). None of them come close to the amount of detail as the raster OSM tiles while still being as readable.
I've never found anyone as bothered with this as I am. Vector styles are cool as they zoom and pan very smoothly, and their style is fairly easily editable. But, for any map where you actually want to see map data instead of using it as a base map for your own data, vector maps fall short.
Maybe it is just because of computational limits. I can imagine that displaying the same amount of detail as the OSM raster tiles would require too many resources: both on the client side and for tile generation.
It would be nice if OpenStreetMap would try to mimic their raster style closer, instead of providing just another low contrast, low detail base map. I hope this release of open vector tiles will facilitate more detailed vector maps!
Another option is to use the extract functionality in pmtiles [4] to extract your area of interest from their daily full-planet pmtiles builds. You can then statically host that file and use that in your client with one of their client libraries.
[1] https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler
[2] https://download.geofabrik.de/
Protomaps also provides daily updated full-planet pmtiles [2], from which you can create a pmtiles extract using its CLI.
[1] https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler [2] https://docs.protomaps.com/basemaps/downloads
Some examples:
A battleship variant: each team first their his ships in a battleship field. Then, when a player can reach the other team's camp without getting tagged, they can shoot one shot into the field of the other team.
A Stratego variant: every team gets his own stack of cards which represent the different players of Stratego, the board game. Players take a card before leaving their camp. If they are tagged, or tag someone, they show their card to the other person. The winner according to the Stratego rules wins the card of the other person, and the loser must go back to their camp for another card.
Some more games with paint, animal cards, ...
Lot of good memories from that time.