Support for vector tiles rendering in SceneKit

[6cesco]

Do you plan to add support for vector tiles rendering using SceneKit? If not, do you have any recommendations on where to start with adding this support to your project (I'm considering to start contributing)? Maybe you investigated it in the past and have some useful tips.

The reason why this support would be beneficial is for Apple Watch usecases. The newest Apple Watch releases (especially the Ultra model) have large screens and good CPUs suitable for map displaying. There are countless outdoor applications which could be implemented with the help of your library. Unfortunately there's no support for Metal and Open GL on watchOS and SceneKit seems to be the only feasible alternative.

It would be also great if you support reading from vector tiles saved offline (e.g. in .mbtiles format). Do you have this on your roadmap?

[stmitt]

This feature is not on our roadmap.
I think a SceneKit rendering engine could work. Maybe it would be best if you start by implementing the shader_factory_interface and graphics_object_factory_interface.
maps-core is build in a modular architecture and all modules are injectable.
Unfortunately I don't have helpful tip how to implement this feature in detail since im not aware how SceneKit works exactly.

[mauron85]

@6cesco any updates? Did you managed to implement SceneKit?

[maerki]

We hope that watchOS will support Metal at some point. The vector style specification contains so many rendering details, that a high level framework like SceneKit is not suitable to implement everything.

[maerki]

Having that said, GraphicsFactory.swift might be a point to start. A SceneKit implementation would need to be able to create instances of all those types with correct behavior.