[FR] 3d elevation

[farfromrefug]

Hi,

recently i started to use Magic Earth as an alternative to Google Maps on my phone.
They have one crazy feature: 3d elevation.
Would it be something possible with the way Carto is written? It would be such an amazing addition!

[jaakla]

Thanks for the feedback! We have considered this, and actually have implemented quite a few 3D features, see the project wiki pages (3D city, we have had 3D globe in previous SDK versions etc). The issue is that while it looks nice, but is a lot of extra work to build, but finds very little practical use. Most maps need to be simplified as much as possible, and except for some special cases (e.g. hiking maps) 3D is just confusing users. In other words - there are no just enough paying customers to pay off the extra implementation costs. From technical standpoint - as any other complex added feature it increases code base and may make other parts less stable or slower, so we need to be extra careful on choosing such extra features.

[farfromrefug]

@jaakla i totally get what you mean. And it makes sense. I agree that you need to have a strong paying customer base to be able to "invest" in big feature.
My point of view is a little bit different. I am seeing this from an open source point of view. I strongly believe that Carto could be the right choice for OpenStreetMap vector framework. MapForge is far behind and Carto can do so much more. There is also Tangram and they are testing such features as 3d maps(tangrams/tangram-es#1875)
3d maps can be very very useful while hiking and there is a potential there for a framework, and thus an app, to be used over others because of that.
Consequently i was asking to see how big this would be implementation wise.
I can see this is pretty big and thus i have my answer ;)

Thanks!