Technology @lemmy.world boramalper @lemmy.world 5 days ago

OpenFreeMap - a public vector tile server for OpenStreetMap

openfreemap.org OpenFreeMap

OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting lets you display custom maps on your website and apps for free.

13 comments

There is no tile server running; only nginx serving a Btrfs image with 300 million hard-linked files.

Wow. Btrfs ftw
I haven't dug into the docs much. This really does return vectors? Because all of the OSM servers and services I have seen return tiles that are bitmaps, which for the type of data being displayed always seemed like a rather moronic way to do it.
- Yep, vectors. See https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler
  
  Neat.
- They generally intend to move to vectors afaik. There was a blogpost and call for donations by them a while ago.
Before anyone gets too deep I'd like to point out that this is just about hosting vector tiles, the actual tile gen is a separate project. Not to say that hosting large sets of files is trivial, just that there's more to the picture than one repo.

https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler
Supporting on GitHub. Just a few bucks a month. It won't take many of us to get to $175/mo.
I'm curious how much faster it is rather than downloading images
- You mean how much faster downloading vector tiles are in comparison to raster tiles?
  
  I think pre-rendering makes the biggest difference, rather than the type of tiles.
  
  Loading vector tiles should require significantly less data/bandwidth while also offering completely linear scaling without any steps. I hope this works well enough to eventually replace the current implementation.
Are there any android apps that use this yet?

Do you think osmand has any plan to add support?
- This is a brand new project so I'm sure no apps are using this yet or even have plans to.

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