Hide polygons that are within a specific area - mapbox

I'm trying to create an experience where I have a couple of detailed 3D models of buildings on the map with extruded building footprints of neighboring buildings via a vector tile source. The 3D models would be the main focus point and the extruded footprints would be for reference. One challenge I'm running into is that I have a global building footprint layer and it has a footprint for the 3D buildings which doesn't match up perfectly. Additionally, when extruded, it ends up merging/overlapping the nice 3D models.
I'd like to be able to hide the individual footprints that overlap the 3D models. My original thought was to grab the bounding box of the 3D model and then use the new within style expression, but it looks like this will only filter points and lines, not polygons. The building footprint polygons have no unique information in them that I could use to filter on.
I know I could monitor map movements and query the rendered features and manually detect intersecting polygons, but since there is no unique property on the footprint, I can't filter or use feature state.
Any ideas of how to efficiently avoid rendering individual polygons in a specific area that come in from a vector tile source?

It is a common issue that the buildings layer in Mapbox Streets don't contain any unique attributes to allow filtering or rendering differently.
The best solution is usually to source a different buildings layer, and in this case, remove those redundant buildings in pre-processing.
I can think of one rather crazy workaround that might work here, although the performance may be poor.
Add the building layer with very low opacity, of type fill, essentially invisible. (Maybe invisible would work.) Call your main source buildings`.
Create a secondary building source of type geojson, and a secondary fill-extrusion layer. Call this source buildings-copy.
On map move or moveend, use querySourceFeatures to obtain a copy of all buildings.
Process this copy using Turf to remove the buildings you don't want, and call setData to set the copy as the data for buildings-copy.
You may need to do some clever caching to get reasonable performance.

Related

how to avoid polygon being clipped with tileset?

I am generating a layer UK scale, it is composed for several polygons, the idea for the layer is to display it fully and then the user can zoom to most specific area. The main problem is because the number of polygons when I create the .mbtile it split some of the polygon at determined zooms.
I have tried with different options of tippecanoe like --not duplication extend zooms if still dropping ... but I couldn't nail whit the correct commands to make it work.
tippecanoe -zg --read-parallel -l $LAYER -o "$OUT_MBTILES" "$OUT_JSON" --coalesce-densest-as-needed --extend-zooms-if-still-dropping --no-duplication
I suspect this is somehow related to --no-duplication. Per the documentation:
--no-duplication: As with --no-clipping, each feature is included intact instead of cut to tile boundaries. In addition, it is included only in a single tile per zoom level rather than potentially in multiple copies. Clients of the tileset must check adjacent tiles (possibly some distance away) to ensure they have all features.
I'm not sure why you're using that option, but disable it if possible.
It's hard to be more specific without seeing your data and having a lot more information about what you're trying to achieve, zoom levels, attributes, data size etc.

Best Practice to display local markers and a wider area of points of interest markers?

I've created a base layer and 6 different overlay (Points of Interest) layers for a leaflet map.
The base layer of markers can appear on the map almost anywhere in the world, but I want the POI layers to appear only if they are in the same area (mapBounds) of the base layer. Probably the screen size.
All the data is pulled from a MySQL database and using Ajax I create the various sets of markers from two different tables, base and poi. This much is all done and working, you can see it at https://net-control.us/map2.php. The green and blue markers are from the base table, other markers are currently selected for view by clicking on the appropriate icon in the lower right. The only one active at the moment is 'Fire Station'. But if you zoom out far enough you will see additional fire stations in the Kansas City area, and in Florida. Those sets are not needed.
After the query runs I create a fitBounds variable of the base layer and another poiBounds for the poi layer. But I'm not sure I need the poiBounds. The number of base markers is generally less than 50 for the base query, but if all the poi markers are pulled world wide that number could be very large.
So I'm hoping someone can help me determine a best practice for this kind of scenario and maybe offer up an example of how it should be done. Should I...
1) Download all POIs and not worry about them appearing outside the base bounds layer? Should I inhibit them from showing in the javascript or in the SQL? How?
2) If I inhibit the unwanted points from SQL do I test one POI at a time to see if its included in the base bounds? How? Are there MySQL functions perhaps to work with this kind of data?
I'm fairly new at leaflet maps and would appreciate examples if appropriate.
2) If I inhibit the unwanted points from SQL do I test one POI at a time to see if its included in the base bounds? How? Are there MySQL functions perhaps to work with this kind of data?
You probably want a column of type POINT, a spatial index on such column (which internally is likely to be implemented as an R-Tree), and spatial relation functions on your SQL query to make use of that index.
Start by reading https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/spatial-types.html. Take your time, as spatial databases, spatial data types and spatial indices work a bit differently than their non-spatial equivalents.

Simplify GeoJSON by retaining external boundaries (clustering)

I created a website (http://www.cartescolaire.paris) that basically loads a GeoJSON and displays it on a map using Leaflet.
This geoJSON is pretty large (over 2 Mb), the loading time can be very long (it doesn't even load on IE 11). More importantly the resulting map is not very responsive when zooming / navigating.
There are around 110 zones (clicking on a point in the map highlights the zone it belongs to), each of them made from dozens of polygons.
However the only important information that I want to visualize is the external boundaries of each zone.
Such a compressed geometry would be much more efficient performance-wise.
The complexity arises from the constraint that the zones shouldn't overlap.
The final result should be disjoint clusters.
Any idea how I could do that ?
Thanks a lot !
Bonjour,
You sound to need merging of polygons, so that you decrease your number of vector features, the weight of your GeoJSON file and map responsiveness. Keeping your resulting polygons disjoint should not be difficult.
You should have plenty resources on SO / GIS Stack Exchange and Google on this, for example:
https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/118223/merge-geojson-polygons-with-wgs84-coordinate
https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/118547/convert-geojson-with-multiple-polygons-and-multipolygons-into-single-multipolygo
http://morganherlocker.com/post/Merge-a-Set-of-Polygons-with-turf/
(see also the related posts on SO on the right menu of this page, just above "Hot Network Questions")
Your case might be slightly different as most of your polygons are not adjacent, but are actually separated by empty areas / a margin (streets).
You might also be interested in UTFGrid for the interaction (clicking on the map to open the school associated with that area), as it would dramatically restore your map responsiveness: instead of vector shapes, you have the equivalent of tiles. See an example: http://danzel.github.io/Leaflet.utfgrid/example/map.html
However, I do not think you can visually show the areas with UTFGrid.
But you could combine this approach with canvas-based tiles, or even pre-generate tiles on your server and have them ready for display, rather than keeping a GeoJSON for client-side computation.
Bon courage !

Tile Grid Data storage for 3D Space in Unity

This question is (mostly) game engine independent but I have been unable to find a good answer.
I'm creating a turn-based tile game in 3D space using Unity. The levels will have slopes, occasional non-planar geometry, depressions, tunnels, stairs etc. Each level is static/handcrafted so tiles should never move. I need a good way to keep track of tile-specific variables for static levels and i'd like to verify if my approaches make sense.
My ideas are:
Create 2 Meshes - 1 is the complex game world, the second is a reference mesh overlay that will have minimal geometry; it will not be rendered and will only be used for the tiles. I would then Overlay the two and use the 2nd mesh as a grid reference.
Hard-code the tiles for each level. While tedious it will work as a brute force approach. I would, however, like to avoid this since it's not very easy to deal with visually.
Workaround approach - Convert the 3d to 2D textures and only use 1 mesh.
"Project" a plane down onto the level and record height/slope to minimize complexity. Also not ideal.
Create individual tile objects for each tile manually (non-rendered). Easiest solution i could think of.
Now for the Unity3D specific question:
Does unity allow selecting and assigning individual Verts/Triangles/Squares of a mesh and adding componenets, scripts, or variables to those selections; for example, selecting 1 square in the 10x10 unity plane and telling unity the square of that plane now has a new boolean attached to it? This question mostly refers to idea #1 above, where i would use a reference mesh for positional and variable information that were directly assigned to the mesh. I have a feeling that if i do choose to have a reference mesh, i'd need to have the tiles be individual objects, snap them in place using the reference, then attach relevant scripts to those tiles.
I have found a ton of excellent resources (like http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/gameprog.html) on tile generation (mostly procedural), i'm a bit stuck on the basics due to being new to unity and im not looking for procedural design.

Is it possible to random generate tmx (map) files in Objective-C?

Basically, I'm making an iPhone RPG as a little project for myself, I'm using Cocos2d and thus 2D tiled maps. I had planned to do randomly generate the levels for the map, but have realised it may be harder than I think to randomly generate them and keep collidable tiles working.
Is this possible to do, and has anyone done it?
I'm not familiar with tmx file format you are asking about but usually the way you go about generating a map is to start with the physics of the map not the visual representation. Here is two way to do it
(1) Define materials (water, sand, rock)
(2) Define how much of each you want to use in the map (as percentage)
(3) Place material seeds in your map
(4) Grow the seeds by expanding the material in all directions until the space is full
(5) Now define relation between visual tile and material. If it's transition from one material to another or 100% of one material.
(6) Generate your visual representation using material map and relation between materials and art.
...
(3) Fill your map with the materials you defined using the appropriate amount you defined.
(4) Use clustarization algorithm to swap tiles and form islands. (increasing the number of steps of your clustarization algorithm will make fewer but larger islands)
...
(0) There may be some other rules that the map needs to follow like accesability from one area to another. You can start by placing that in your physics map first and not allowing the other algorithms to break it.
Good luck!
Random map generation is possible and is used in many games. Diablo is one of the first games that come to my mind. Don't forget to set proper boundaries for the generation algorithm, however, because it might create a map with impassable locations.