Experimental version of TileMill powered by vector tiles. There are currently no supported releases of this software.
Vector tiles are the vector data equivalent of image tiles for web mapping. They apply the strengths of tiling -- developed for caching, scaling and serving map imagery rapidly -- to vector data. Consider an image tile at the zxy coordinate 14/4823/6160. This image is a PNG that depicts the corner of lower Manhattan with roads, building footprints, and parks:
http://a.tiles.mapbox.com/v3/examples.map-zr0njcqy/14/4823/6160.png
A vector tile at 14/4823/6160 would contain all the corresponding geometries and metadata -- like road names, area types, building heights -- in a compact, parsable format. Vector tiles are a highly performant format that provide greater flexibility in terms of styling, output format, and interactivity.
+----------+ +----------+
| | | |
| vector | | cartocss |
| tile +-+-+ styles |
| | | | |
+----------+ | +----------+
v
+-------------+
| |
| renderer |
| |
+------+------+
|
+---------------+------+------+---------------+
| | | |
+----v-----+ +-----v----+ +----v-----+ +-----v----+
| | | | | | | |
| geojson | | png tile | | utf tile | | ?????? |
| | | | | | | |
+----------+ +----------+ +----------+ +----------+
Vector tiles are designed to use the same tiling and coordinate scheme used by image tiles and take full advantage of HTTP. CDN caching, high scalability and efficient distribution make vector tiles a much more attractive solution than running, say, a enormous cluster of database and application servers that respond to queries on demand.
Here are some rough details of our implementation at time of writing:
- Vector tiles are Protocol Buffers, a compact binary format for transferring messages.
- Vector tiles store a serialized version of the internal data that Mapnik uses when rendering maps.
- Vector tiles are organized into layers (e.g. roads, water, areas), which contain individual features each with a geometry and variable number of attributes per layer(e.g. name, type, etc.).
TM2 ships with an example vector tile source: MapBox Streets. When you create your first project you will have full access to style curated data from OpenStreetMap without setting up PostGIS, downloading and importing a large planet database file, or any of the other steps usually taken to work with OpenStreetMap data. If you have been working on styles for streets in London and want to check how well your styles apply to data in Paris, TM2 will download the vector tiles on-the-fly as you pan over to France. TM2 caches downloaded vector tiles to an MBTiles database on disk so that you can take your work offline in a limited fashion.
Unlike TileMill, TM2 makes a hard split between two types of packages:
- Styles contain stylesheets, basic thin metadata (name, description, attribution, etc.), and a reference to a datasource.
- Sources describe a source for vector tiles, for example a URL endpoint from which to download tiles. We also have an API for generating vector tiles on the fly from traditional Mapnik datasources (shapefiles, postgis, etc) -- see tilelive-bridge for more info.
TM2 focuses on editing Styles, but there is also an early UI for working with Sources.
Dependencies are:
- Node.js v0.10.x (should also work with v0.8.x)
- Protobuf compiler and libprotobuf-lite
- Mapnik
Note: Mapnik is now bundled inside node-mapnik for common platforms (64 bit Linux and OS X). This means that you do not need to install Mapnik externally. However if node-mapnik fails to install from a binary then you are likely running a platform for which no node-mapnik binaries are available. In this case you will need to build node-mapnik from source.
Build status of modules:
- mapnik -
- node-mapnik -
- carto -
- tilelive.js -
- tilelive-vector -
- tilelive-bridge -
Binary builds are available for OS X at http://tilemill.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html?path=dev/. Follow the instructions below to install from source if you are interested in developing on TM2.
First install Node.js. You can do this with homebrew, via the easy installer at http://nodejs.org/download, or via tools like nvm.
Then build:
git clone https://github.com/mapbox/tm2.git
cd tm2
npm install
node index.js
First install the latest Node.js v0.10.x version:
sudo apt-get install python-software-properties
echo 'Yes' | sudo apt-add-repository ppa:chris-lea/node.js
sudo apt-get update -y
sudo apt-get install -y nodejs build-essential
Then build:
git clone https://github.com/mapbox/tm2.git
cd tm2
npm install
node index.js
A valid TM2 project is a folder that contains at minimum a valid project.yml file and at least one CartoCSS .mss file that is referenced by the YML file. The folder should also contain any images that are directly referenced by the style as patterns, icons, etc.
If you have any source files (Photoshop/Gimp/Illustrator/Inkscape documents, mockups, reference files, etc) that are not directly required to render the style, they should be named beginning with an underscore or kept in a subdirectory beginning with an underscore. TM2 will ignore such files & folders when creating packages to deploy for rendering.
Click the Package link from the settings pane of a project.
TM2 styles are packaged into 'tm2z' files for deployment to a rendering server. The package only contains:
project.xml- the Mapnik-ready XML style definition automatically built by TM2 from the project's CartoCSS files and project.ymlpng,jpg, andsvgfiles unless they begin with an_
All other files are omitted from packaging.
Local TM2 source transform traditional geodata formats (shapefiles, geojson, postgis, etc.) into vector tiles. A data.yml file captures a configuration of datasources organized as named layers. There is no visual style associated with any given source and the source UI of TM2 autogenerates an inspection style only for viewing your data.
When configuring your source there are several parameters to give extra attention:
- Maxzoom (source): the highest zoom level for which vector tiles should be rendered. After this zoom level styles using this source will overzoom, using geometries from the maxzoom level. If this value is set too low, geometries will appear crude/oversimplified at higher zoomlevels. If this value is set too high, you will need to generate many more vector tiles than necessary for your data.
- Buffer size (layer): the number of "pixel" units geometries should extend beyond tile boundaries. If set too low, especially for lines and polygons, geometries will not extend beyond tiles enough to allow for wide strokes, blurs, and other styles. Higher values, however, include more geometry data in each vector tile bloating size.
Click the Export link from the settings pane of a source.
The resulting MBTiles file contains mapnik vector PBF tiles rather than PNG or JPG image tiles. This MBTiles file can be uploaded to Mapbox and served from your Mapbox account via its Map ID.
Once your source data is uploaded to Mapbox you (or your colleagues) can start working with it without needing the original database or setup.
Click the Mapbox link from the Sources pane and enter the Map ID of your source.
Vector tiles for this source are now loaded over HTTP from Mapbox and can be added to a style.