Client-side layer content

[bvjustin]

Hello!

I've been studying the Mapbox GL native code a bit and I am super impressed with the capabilities it has in its current state. I was there when @incanus unveiled Mapbox GL Cocoa to the crowd at Mapbox SF this past June, and it's great to see all the progress being made.

Here's what I want to do:

From a high level, I want to be able to render my (non-tiled) content that’s generated on the client in a Mapbox GL map at my specified z order in the rendering tree. You can imagine this as a weather satellite image above the terrain but below the roads/city name layers. And as these data are updated often, I would need to be able to animate/loop it. Any client provided content would not need to be parsed by Mapbox (it would be lower level than just providing an image). I can envision providing some texture data along with some vertices and tex coordinates, or maybe providing a custom shader or something...

Having stepped through the existing code to try to understand how it all works, I'm hoping someone can perhaps point me down the path to accomplish the above in a way that fits the existing code and is maintainable going forward.

Is there any documentation/guide anywhere that sort of explains what the classes are/what they do/how they relate? I've gathered a very basic understanding of the Map, and that there are Styles and Sources, but the relationships between these and some of the lower level classes get a bit more difficult to keep track of by just inspecting/running the code (Buckets come to mind here). I can surely learn this from further inspection of the code, but if there is some sort of primer out there, that would be great!

I know you're all busy making this project awesome, so I appreciate you taking the time to point me in the right direction!

[ljbade]

@bvjustin, @incanus is working on this here: #507

[hallahan]

+1

[bvjustin]

@ljbade I did see that issue before I posted this. I'm not sure if it will provide what I'm after, but it's definitely similar (it was the closest thing I could find to what I described above).

[incanus]

Hi @bvjustin. Yes, this is covered by #507, though not described in the same way there. Any client-side data would be able to be interspersed with any other style layers (including from server vector tiles), and all layers are able to have animatable style properties. So stay tuned to #507 (I'm working on this as we speak) and all should be clearer soon (as well as have Cocoa APIs).

Re: getting oriented, everything that's available is up on GitHub up in this repo or gl-cocoa. You might also check out gl-js which is about 95% comparable as a possibly easier way to dive in and figure out what's going on, but I'm afraid just gritting your teeth and going for it is the best, although complex, approach :-)