MLT Support?

[louwers]

Will Planetiler support MLT? If there is a tracking issue, then let's add Planetiler to the list of (planned) integrators. https://maplibre.org/maplibre-tile-spec/implementation-status/

[HarelM]

@louwers we can open a PR to add it I believe if this is something we would like to push through. I'm guessing that adding a configuration flag and an encoder (java lib dependency) should be a fairly trivial task...

[msbarry]

Yes, definitely want MLT support in planetiler, was just waiting until it's ready. I opened #1349 to track.

Last I checked there were some performance issues encoding MLT tiles, so may need to do some performance work to make it usable over large areas.

[louwers]

It's ready! We're using a 'living standard' model where experimental features may continue to evolve instead of a versioned specification. But no further changes to the core spec are expected (see maplibre/maplibre-tile-spec#560).

The Native implementation is actually quite far along with a release expected before the end of the year, so it would be great to see the ecosystem adopt it too.

[msbarry]

Great! Just thinking through some things we'll also need...

• If you store mlt's in a pmtiles archive we should have a new "MLT" tile type: https://github.com/protomaps/PMTiles/blob/main/spec/v3/spec.md#tile-type-tt cc/ @bdon
• For storing them in an mbtiles should we use mlt or "application/vnd.maplibre-vector-tile" (source) ?

[bdon]

should we just assign it 0x06 in the pmtiles spec?

[jatech1]

Can someone point me to what command line param needs to be set to build MLT pmtiles output? I went through the issue and PR and am probably just missing it... thanks!

[msbarry]

Yep it will be in the next release, there are just a few blockers to resolve in MLT repo before putting out a planetiler release: #1349

[ReadyPlayerEmma]

How far off is a release that includes this support now?

[msbarry]

I was waiting for this change maplibre/maplibre-tile-spec#814 to test out shared dictionary handling. Everything seems to work now so I should be able to get the release out today or tomorrow!

[HarelM]

If you are aiming for a smooth release I would wait a few more days to have maplibre-gl-js have this dependency picked up and a new version released with the updated mlt. But feel free to release a version regardless. :-)

[msbarry]

Sounds good, I'll prep the shared dictionary PR #1463 and do some full-planet runs with and without it to see what the impact is.