Apr 14, 2023

MapLibre Newsletter - April 2023

Highlights

Komoot joined the MapLibre Sponsorship Program as a Silver Sponsor. Welcome komoot, we are glad to have you in the MapLibre community! Read the news announcement…

We released version 2.0.0 of the Android Navigation library. Big thanks to Robin Boldt and everyone who helped with this! Read the news announcement…

The Metal Project Team has now officially started to work on the MapLibre Native migration from OpenGL to Metal on Apple devices. Steve Gifford wrote a blog post about the role of WetDogWeather in this migration. Our goal is to get a Metal Beta release out by the end of 2023. Read more about it in our news announcement…

MapLibre is happy to host a new repository: flutter-maplibre-gl! This project provides MapLibre bindings for Flutter. flutter-maplibre-gl

Finally, MapLibre GL JS has hit 200k weekly downloads on npm for the first time!

Bounty Program

The amounts allocated to Bounty Directions are pre-approved budgets. If an individual or a company would like to work on a Bounty Direction but requires more funding, they can make a request to the Governing Board to increase the budget of a Bounty Direction.

MapLibre Native

People interested in contributing can schedule a call with Bart Louwers, Maintainer MapLibre Native: maplibre/maplibre-native#898.

Bounties 💰

Have a look at all available Bounties in MapLibre Native and feel free to propose Bounties yourself. Read our step-by-step Bounties guide.

Contributions

Contributions since March 20th, 2023:

Most notable PRs:

• First bounty was finalised by Loc Nguyen: Getting Started Guide MapLibre Native for Android has now step by step guides and also a demo codebase #808
• Thanks to Tadej Novak we have our first split repository initiative. We started with Qt platform Qt platform
• OpenGL 2 support is dropped. For the ones that still want to use OpenGL 2 please refer to the opengl-2 branch.

Rendering Modularization & Metal project

Project highlights since March 20th, 2023:

• Work was focused on shaders reorg and tests
• The Project Roadmap is now available.
• Upgrade to OpenGL ES 3.0
  • Motivation, consequences:
    • Most Android devices are compatible with OpenGL ES 3.0
    • One platform that will suffer a drawback until the Metal backend will be implemented is macOS
    • A branch was created for OpenGL ES 2.0 support: opengl-2

MapLibre GL JS

Bounties 💰

Bounties completed since March 20th, 2023:

• Remove style-spec from the repo in favor of references to the npm package Use @maplibre/maplibre-gl-style-spec in MapLibre GL JS
• Opacity fix for setTerrain by adding a warnonce when it detects that a user is using the same source for a hillshade and for 3D terrain Opacity fix for setTerrain
• Add queryTerrainElevation allows getting terrain elevation in meters at specific point (#2264)

Contributions

Most notable PRs since March 20th, 2023:

• Yi Zhang (Microsoft) - Improve initial loading performance by lazy serializing layers only when needed. (#2306)
• Cuong Nguyen - Add queryTerrainElevation allows getting terrain elevation in meters at specific point (#2264)
• Karol Leśniak Improved the CSS4 color support (#2376)

MapLibre Style Specification

The MapLibre Style Specification has been moved out of MapLibre GL JS and lives now in its own repository: maplibre-style-spec

Big thanks to Birk Skyum for bringing up the new documentation website for the style spec at MapLibre Style Spec!

Debated design proposals:

• Support for refreshTiles per tile source #61
• Expanding tileSources bounds #60
• Add elevation to symbol layer #62
• Update text-offset to better support variable anchor placement #112

Since there are now two design proposals that expand the TileJSON specification, we plan to create a fork of TileJSON and maintain it in the MapLibre Organization.

Some data sources like traffic have non-global coverage. To avoid loading empty tiles, we want to introduce more complex source tile bounds in the TileJSON specification.