Library for handling vector tiles in Mapsui
Mapsui.VectorTile is a add on to Mapsui. It has no platform dependencies and come up to now as a PCL with Profile111.
Vector tile formats use no ready rendered bitmaps, but vectors (points, lines and polygons) with tags, which describe, what features they have. This vectors are than rendered on-the-fly with settings from a style. In this style is described, which type of vector with special given tags should rendered in which color and which line width.
It is work in progress and far from ready.
Mapsui.VectorTiles support the following formats.
Mapbox Vector Tile format. Because it uses BruTile to fetch the data, it could handle online vector tiles, which come normally with the ending "MVT", and offline vetor tiles, which come normally as MBTiles. For vector tile format descriptions see the Mapbox Vector Tile Specification and for MBTiles file format see MBTiles Specification.
A style is a document that defines the visual appearance of a map: what data to draw, the order to draw it in, and how to style the data when drawing it. Normally each vector tile format has its own styling format, because each format brings its own tag names. So it is difficult to use one styling format for all vector tile formats.
The Mapbox GL Style is well defined and has many different settings. If you use vector tiles from Mapbox, you could use styles, which are created with Mapbox Studio. An alternative is Maputnik. If you use this, you could get vector tiles from OpenMapTiles. For a ready made style see Osm-Liberty.
A Mapbox GL Style file comes as Json file.
Mapsui.VectorTiles use many other open source projects, without this wouldn't be possible. Thanks for all the work of this authors.
There are many others, that inspired the project with their work on StackOverflow, GitHub and other great websites out there in the internet. Thank you!