Hi everyone; I noticed that in cities with a lot of information in the map, I often would like to zoom deeper into the map than is possible in the standard interface, e.g. in Zürich at http://osm.org/go/0C0WCm2yw– … many small shops etc. with hard to read names. Is there an easy way? If not, then my humble suggestion is to increase the maximum zoom level of the map 
1 Like
What about the vector based map from http://flosm.de → POI map ?
Technicaly this shouldn’t be a problem. We would need additional disk-space an CPU power to generate the tiles for an additional layer.
Just out of curiosity: Can anyone tell us, how many GByte mapnick currently uses for zoomlevel 19?
This seems to be an ongoing problem, and when navigating most cities the current maximum zoom level often omits the name of 50%+ of the stores, seemingly because they simply won’t fit onto the canvas:
This makes me regularly go back to other map services for these places, which is a shame.
Perhaps this additional zoom level could also somehow be done in the browser? Then it wouldn’t require server-side disk space. It’s not like the house geometry would need more detail, there’s just more space needed to show the individual text labels.
My apologies if I’m posting this in the wrong place, or if this suggestion isn’t helpful.
Here’s the problem on the regular map and not the nomatim view:
(For some reason, on nomatim.openstreetmap.org it seems to be slightly worse.)
Yes, that’s exactly what the under-development vector tiles project (documented elsewhere on this site) will do.
1 Like
That sounds great, so basically all I need to do is to wait?
I wonder though how vector tiles will perform on low-spec machines. Google Maps for example constantly freezes and lags on my slowest smartphone, while openstreetmap.org is comparatively snappy for now. But I guess I’ll see once it goes live… 
You can test here https://vector.openstreetmap.org/demo/shortbread/#12.95/-27.96751/153.39965 (it is a bit unclear if what form and what will be the default style of the vector tiles once available via osm.org, but you can still test performance).
Sadly, the performance drop does seem to be noticeable. Is there a way to attach videos? I recorded a comparison, but if I attach a .gif it’s going to be pretty giant.
IMHO the impact is well known (even my default desktop computer doesn’t really work with vector tiles) so no need to demonstrate that. I haven’t seen (that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist) any kind of plan on how VTs are actually going to be introduced on osm.org, but I believe that the raster tiles will likely stay around for a bit.
2 Likes
Absolutely, yes, I don’t think anyone has talked about deprecating the raster tiles any time soon. For what it’s worth the vector tiles are pretty snappy even on my 2014 Mac mini.
Other layers may show higher zoom levels, e.g. transport or cycle, here is an example: OpenStreetMap (but this does not include all names or pois?)
For osm-carto like style, OpenStreetMap Retina Tiles Demo has a z=20 as well, OpenStreetMap Larger Text Example has a “21” that is a zoom 20 but with larger text. So those help e.g. in [OpenStreetMap Larger Text Example](Rue de Toulouse in Rennes in OSM-Carto Larger Text Demo) vs. [OpenStreetMap](Rue de Toulouse in Rennes in normal OSM-Carto)
And for the Uk, @SomeoneElse has you covered with his map, e.g. Useful Maps (up to zoom 28 I think?)
I seem to be seeing a slowdown of something in the range of 20-50%, which for a device where the map is already laggy is a painful difference.
If raster tiles aren’t getting deprecated soon, was a higher zoom level ever considered? It is quite difficult to find stores in the city center when so many names are missing.
Those raster tiles are 24 overzoomed to 25, but 28 would be possible with the same code.
My experience has been that my own vector tiles are usable in places where the iD editor is far too slow to use - once that vector link has loaded, try zooming out - I’d expect to see the screen go blank and then repaint as new POIs are drawn, but at zoom levels >= 14 it won’t need to fetch new data from the server (other than new tiles around the edge). How many seconds delay do you get there?
The raster tiles have like 1-3FPS, the vector version has more like 0.5-1FPS. Or at least that’s how it feels like, I don’t have exact measurements (but I would have video to share if there was a way to upload .webm).