Mapbox Streets and Terrain now follow Vector Tile Specification version 2

Jake Pruitt
Wed, 11 May 2016 00:00:00 -0400

We upgraded billions of our tiles in Mapbox Streets and Terrain* to follow the updated Mapbox Vector Tile Specification, which are now 100% compatible with our faster GL triangulation library, earcut. Polygons are guaranteed to be OGC valid and have clearly defined winding-orders for exterior and interior polygons, which means decoders like Mapbox GL Native and Mapbox GL JS have less work to do when rendering these v2 tiles.

Re-encoding the complex geometries of our base layers, like the hillshading multipolygons of Mapbox Terrain, exposed a lot of edge-case bugs in our clipping and encoding algorithms in mapnik-vector-tile and node-mapnik. We’re confident now that our encoder can handle very challenging source data and still produce valid v2 tiles.

We’ve also integrated the new vector tile v2 work into our Uploads API, so all of your tilesets that you create in Mapbox Studio or Mapbox Studio Classic will be earcut-ready too. If you uploaded your data in the last two weeks or you use Mapbox Terrain or Mapbox Streets in your maps, then you are already using v2 tiles.

Stay tuned for announcements on the earcut speed improvements in our client libraries and APIs, and let us know on Twitter how we can help you build faster and cleaner maps with these new v2 tiles.

* The specific source ids are mapbox://mapbox-streets-v5, mapbox://mapbox-streets-v6, mapbox://mapbox-streets-v7 and mapbox://mapbox-terrain-v2. Streets v4 and terrain v1 will be upgraded to the new vector tile specification soon.