alt Hacker NewsMapLibre Tile: a modern and efficient vector tile format
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Had to search a bit, but here's a demo page: https://maplibre.org/maplibre-gl-js/docs/examples/display-a-... Can be compared with: https://maplibre.org/maplibre-gl-js/docs/examples/display-a-...
In that example I saw this in the console:
before - 2.41+26.29+24.87+71.28+59.2+77.57 - 261.62kb
after - 2.45+22.4 +22.66+60.6+51.99+77.57 - 237.67kb
This is interesting. We recently deployed a solution that uses pmtiles and it's great.
https://docs.protomaps.com/pmtiles/
afaik, pmtiles uses mvt, let's hope the tooling to convert the tiles to mlt also becomes available.
MapLibre is an awesome project, their JS library is by far the best way to display maps in the browser that I've come across. Very excited to eventually switch to this format!
Planetiler currently supports generating MLT by adding —-tile-format=mlt cli argument. It’s only on latest main right now but I should be able to get a release out in the next few days. In my testing I’ve seen ~10% reduction in overall OpenMapTiles archive size with default settings but there are some more optimizations the team is working on that should bring it down even further.
Unfortunately, Tilemaker hasn't planned or cannot plan to support MLT in the medium-term.
That will leave a significant part of the community out of this transition.
See this interesting (and quite heated) discussion : https://github.com/systemed/tilemaker/issues/856
It's cool that stuff like vector file formats is still being reinvented. What's the new idea(s) here, though?
Like, I get that it's new and has better features (better compression, faster decoding, etc.) --- but what are the new ideas or insights that led to this design?
Does anyone self host maps? If you do, mind sharing the pros, cons and tools to do that?
I <3 Martin and the team that built it. It's great to see that the Rust stack they used is the one I contributed to, now 8 years ago. Aging like fine wine!
Looks great. I wish there was similar advancement for full 3d tiles. The only real option at the moment is cesiums 3d tiles format which is nowhere near as fast as it could/should be
Been following this for a little bit and am extremely excited for this. I think the final big hurdle for adoption (for those of use in the MapLibre stack at least) will be getting an equivalent As_MLT() function added to PostGIS.
Another thing worth mentioning is it's very similar to the structure of columnar formats like Arrow and Parquet. Anyone with familiarity with these formats could build a decoder in a couple of days. If they don't use FastPFOR.
I really wish they hadn't used FastPFOR. It's a research library and has an incredibly opaque algorithm:
https://ayende.com/blog/199523-C/integer-compression-underst...
Unrelated, but I noticed that clicking the logo goes to the current permalink rather than the homepage, might be unintentional.
I just want support for globe view on maplibre native
I am not familiar with the ecosystem of geographic data and mapping as online services. Can someone please explain...
* How this tile format, or the organization behind it, related to OpenStreetMap (if it is related at all)?
* Why the need to replace the previous tile format / scheme which they mention?
* What challenges such a project faces (other than, I suppose, being noticed and considered for adoption)?
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I find it shocking that a reputable resource such as this is still displaying the size of Greenland or Africa wrong (Mercator projection) in relation to other land masses in its marketing material and documentation, like here. It just brings doubt to the whole project, which is a shame considering all the time they must have put in. Why show the map that way when majority of its users will never use it for nautical navigation? https://maplibre.org/maplibre-gl-js/docs/examples/display-a-...
Come to the MapLibre talk in the Geospatial devroom at FOSDEM on Saturday
https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/QAL9VN-state-of-the-m...