This is really impressive. Just one question about the distance fog, though: as you say it does give the scene scale when you're close to ground, but if you zoom out everything becomes foggy so it seems like it kind of gets hard to see anything. Wouldn't it make sense to somehow reduce the fog as you zoom out so this doesn't happen?
* openlayers, but vector tiles have no web GL support there
* Procedural GL JS
* tangram
* deck.gl (from Uber)
* harp.gl (from HERE Maps)
Leaflet is also great.
If you're doing any sort of front end GIS I recommend openlayers above all else including mapbox.
But I suspect 99% of users just need basic maps. Leaflet is great for that.
They removed this support in some previous version, I think.
Or do you have a link to a pull request or issue?
(IMO Leaflet is dead now that the creator is working since several years for Mapbox)
What someone can see as less development activity is simply a sign of a mature product that doesn't need many new features and changes to remain useful — focusing on the core basic mapping needs has always been its goal, and it continues to adhere to it.
What I see or meant as a sign of "dead" is that there will be no new features that Mapbox GL JS has but that are critical for future applications. Like proper or inbuilt vector tiles support.
Unfortunately that whole business unit got canned and the code is now gathering dust somewhere :/ would have loved to open source that one
I'd encourage you to reach out and ask for permission to release it. In the past I've found that the sticking point was usually copyright assignment rather than the release per-se (with a side helping of worry over hidden IP violations), so get them to release a tarball under a permissive license like MIT/BSD, even if your intention is to immediately fork it.
Basically, if you can manage to do the work for them so they can just rubber stamp the release, you can probably get it done.
I thought one of the primary features of Leaflet was its modularity. Would built-in vector tile support be an anti-pattern?
I've perpetually run into memory leaks and Max gpu issues whenever I try to use WebGL stuff in Openlayers depending on which browser I use.
Something will work fine in Chrome but max out my laptop's discrete card in Firefox until my laptop thermal throttles.
If you want a concrete example of this I would be happy to put together a reproducible example for you.
It does 3d, 2d, vector tiles, client side geoprocessing, and plenty of open data/service types
I'm keen on industrial archaeology and it's really helpful to have 3D visualisations of sites like old quarries.
Stand-alone 3D models can be done like [1] and the detail is substantially better compared to the map 3D views [2] (pits are pits again!) but I want to embed these into a website and start overlaying other data - just like I can with Mapbox maps.
1. https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/dinorwic-snakes-ladders-and-...
2. https://felixpalmer.github.io/procedural-gl-js/, search for Llanberis
I have seen in demos coming from a few construction projects using this.
We also created a 3D renderer for sports tracking app Ayvri. Our standard player is Cesium, but if you click on the view beta link, you'll see our custom renderer. Still improvements to be made in tile loading.
https://ayvri.com/scene/v5plro09jr/cki6prg1a00013b6baegp6ub6
Three observations:
- Why have a vertical limit when rotating in 3D? I have to click on 2D to look directly top-down. This would be the natural result if I simply tilted the camera all the way downward, but instead it maxes out at some arbitrary angle. (Same the other way, I want to look at the horizon, but I guess there are bandwidth issues involved.)
- Scroll zoom is waaay to slow. I have a mouse with an inertial wheel, so I can just let 'er rip, but this must be frustrating with a regular mouse wheel.
- +/- keys don't zoom, like I'd expect them to.
As you say, the further you can see the higher the bandwidth bill. If you really want to see the horizon, make the window narrow :)
For the other issues, could you please file a issue on the repo? This is not expected and works great on all machines I've tested.
I noticed on the demo that if I zoom all the way out, and then use my mouse wheel to zoom in quickly enough I can clip into the earth and see the black below. This does seem to depend on scroll speed being high enough.
For anyone interested in an open source mapping library (that also has 3D support) that can handle raster data (including the Mapbox tiles), I launched a project 2 weeks ago that is the culmination of 7 years effort: https://github.com/felixpalmer/procedural-gl-js/.
I must say (while acknowledging my huge bias) that I'm disappointed with how the 3D terrain works in the new Mapbox version. It is the top-billed feature, but the controls feel clunky, the terrain often disappears and they didn't even bother implementing distance fog to give the scene scale. When they announced the 3D feature last year I was expecting more.