vt-shaver for basemaps style

[daniel-j-h]

Hey folks I'm looking into the planet pmtiles and seeing they weight around 100+ GB.

I was wondering if anyone has tried running something like vtshaver on the MBTiles with the basemaps style and has numbers of experiences to share wrt. a) if it works out as expected and b) what the savings look like.

References

• https://github.com/mapbox/vtshaver
• https://github.com/protomaps/basemaps

[bdon]

To run VTShaver you need to have a style provided and know what attributes and layers you need.

It seems more efficient to generate a new planet file from scratch if you know those by modifying the java code.

[daniel-j-h]

With the basemaps styles at https://github.com/protomaps/basemaps we do have such styles, no?

With planetiler or tilemaker we'd have to modify the code manually, that's why I was wondering if anyone has tried running vt-shaver on those MBTiles + basemaps style, and then converted them to PMTiles.

[bdon]

Yes, the basemaps styles and the tilesets exist in the same repository because they are designed together: 100% of the features in the tileset are designed to be displayed in the style, so shaving should have minimal effect. vt-shaver is only useful if you're like Mapbox where you have a single tileset used by thousands of custom customer styles. For our model we are not limited to a single tileset so you may as well generate the tileset to your specific style needs instead of requiring a runtime filtering.

[daniel-j-h]

100% of the features in the tileset are designed to be displayed in the style, so shaving should have minimal effect

Got it, this is what I didn't understand before. But then it makes sense 👍 I thought the tiles and the styles are independent.

[bdon]

In the future we may encourage more separation of the tileset and styles, to have a wider range of map style aesthetics and ease the authoring for business-specific proprietary styles. This is possible right now but not the easiest because the tileset design is changing rapidly (we're already planning v4)