For completeness - the style on osm.org has now been updated; changelog here.
5 Likes
Very nice, but there are still a few no-go for me.
The general lack of contrast makes it difficult to make out many details.
- railways are very (zoom 12, 16+) to extremely (all other zoom levels) difficult to discern
- rivers are hard to make out from a distance
Private and public highways & parking are displayed with the same styles.
Trees, park spaces, barriers, are missing.
Most point of interest (shops) are only displayed at very high zoom levels.
It would really help if you could log each of these issues separately at https://github.com/SomeoneElseOSM/SomeoneElse-vector-web-display/issues, and in each case give an example of what something looks like now and what it should look like (perhaps suggesting a new hex colour for something if one could be improved).
I suspect that a number of the “X isn’t visible” ones are actually with the schema, and it may be that the schema is like that for a reason (to keep tiles small), but we won’t know without examples (screenshots) and a bit more detail.
2 Likes
I’m not sure where exactly to raise my issue… 
Small, but usually rectangular objects looks pretty odd. For example those buildings: OpenStreetMap
I would think it would be beneficial to increase the decimals of nodes for usually regular-shaped objects on z16+
What’s happening is as a result of the way that the vector tiles are defined that store the data. Essentially vector tiles tend to be written at zoom levels 0 to 14, where zoom 14 corresponds to raster zoom 15. Every vector zoom level larger than that uses the data from the zoom 14 tile. Obviously zoom 22 would like more precision than zoom 14, but it’s not available. You can see the effect on osm.org if you turn the data layer on, like. here.
There are a couple of ways to deal with this. One would be to write a zoom 15 tile layer, but the extra overhead of that might be significant. Another is to write zoom 14 tiles with more precision.
Tilemaker can do this - see here for an explanation and before and after examples. For completeness, that example is here (tilemaker-generated tiles), here (OSM Carto) and here (Shortbread).
The generation mechanism used for the OSMF vector tiles is not based on Tilemaker but I think based on tilekiln and spirit. I’ve no idea what the impact would be to support either z15 or higher resolution z14 tiles, but one of those would be needed to work around this issue. Whether it would be a good idea for this style is a different question; Shortbread is deliberately small and light and omits much information.
I’m aware of the overall problem since back in the days when I was generating Garmin maps.
Another approach could be to detect the angles in the raw data and preserve them in the data, so the renderer can restore them.
I’ve tried to address a number of the issues raised above:
I’ve changed the display order so this should (finally) no longer be a problem. Compare here and here and zoom in and out. This also resolves this issue.
Glacier labels now work based on size like other water area labels do. Afterwards here only the names for the largest glaciers are shown, and more are shown as you zoom in.
I’ve reduced the opacity for buildings (and also construction sites). Bandung now looks like this:
as opposed to
More obviously beneficial is how things have changed here:
Edit: These aren’t live on the osm.org “Shortbread” layer yet; I have created a PR for that https://github.com/openstreetmap/vectortile-website/pull/73 .
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I have a prototype/demo/idea of how to combine vector tiles with landcover :)
6 Likes
You mention “regional tagging difference near Warsaw” at 1:45, but there is no difference, these are real orchards too. Poland is world’s 4th biggest apple producer and that area accounts for nearly half of Poland’s output.
2 Likes
Oops
Perhaps the later example of Grass was better
I do still think orchard/farmland isn’t always tagged consistently for example near where I live there are tons of orchards that are tagged farmland
Very cool! Great fun to play with and actually useful as well…
Maybe you could offer some pre-defined color schemes, or let users save theirs. I was building a “blue marble” simulation 