Matrix Games Forums

Posted: **Wed Oct 11, 2023 1:29 am**

I hit up a family member who does GIS work for a living and he recommended https://openmaptiles.org/ as a replacement for Stamen maps.

There are a range of different styles https://openmaptiles.org/styles/. Dark Matter is downright sexy for a CMO map.

Open Map Styles & Open Tile Schema

We have prepared a set of beautiful Open Map Styles for our vector tiles. The styles are free and open-source, and you can adapt the design and code for your project or commercial product however you like. Either use one of our map styles directly as your base map or as a starting point for your own map design. You can also use an open-source visual map style editor.

Our new Vector Tile Schema is encoding the cartography decisions made on top of OpenStreetMap, Natural Earth and other OpenData sources and is 100% open and free to use, extend or build upon. We hope people will adapt, copy and reimplement our schema and data model in their projects while providing attribution.

Open-source tools and no vendor lock-in

The whole project is open-source, documented and comes with a license which is friendly even for business use (BSD + CC-BY). The project reuses existing open-source components and open standards from the OpenStreetMap & FOSS community, Mapbox and other third parties. The work on the new open vector tile schema was done in cooperation with Paul Norman and Wikimedia Foundation and was initially modelled after the cartography of the Positron base map from Carto (former CartoDB), with their permission.

With OpenMapTiles there is no lock-in to a single hosting platform or provider, and interested parties can adopt our workflow and do the tile generating as well as hosting completely independently and in-house. We offer maps API for developers and geodata for self-hosting and preprocessed data - including worldwide contour lines and hillshading datasets - to speed up the adoption of the project and applications in production use.

The OpenMapTiles project is a successor of OSM2VectorTiles, a project which won the OpenStreetMap innovation award of 2016 at SOtM in Brussels and which started in Switzerland as a student bachelor thesis at HSR Rapperswil in cooperation with Klokan Technologies GmbH. It is now maintained by MapTiler team.

Posted: **Wed Oct 11, 2023 2:56 am**

The thing that I liked about Stadmen is that is showed the location of individual buildings for placing units during scenario creation. Does openmaptiles do that?

Posted: **Wed Oct 11, 2023 4:22 am**

IIRC OpenTopoMap offers this too?

Posted: **Wed Oct 11, 2023 4:38 am**

Dimitris wrote: Wed Oct 11, 2023 4:22 am IIRC OpenTopoMap offers this too?

It does. I found the TopoMap used to struggle badly regarding tile loading times, but 1328.10 seems to have improved those significantly, even on my laptop.

My only slight quipple might be that the standard white labelling doesn't really stand out when TopoMap is in use, but I only use it for unit placement, rather than actually playing scens on it.

: 20231010 - CMO TopoMap Screenshot.jpg (858.97 KiB) Viewed 2507 times

Posted: **Wed Oct 11, 2023 11:13 am**

TempestII wrote: Wed Oct 11, 2023 4:38 am
My only slight quipple might be that the standard white labelling doesn't really stand out when TopoMap is in use, but I only use it for unit placement, rather than actually playing scens on it.

My only issue with OpenTopoMap is how the icons can get washed out in the bright colors. Like yourself I build scenarios on the detailed maps and usually play them with just borders and coastlines off. Otherwise it's bright colors on bright background and it's easy to lose them.

Posted: **Wed Oct 11, 2023 11:18 am**

TitaniumTrout wrote: Wed Oct 11, 2023 11:13 am
TempestII wrote: Wed Oct 11, 2023 4:38 am
My only slight quipple might be that the standard white labelling doesn't really stand out when TopoMap is in use, but I only use it for unit placement, rather than actually playing scens on it.

My only issue with OpenTopoMap is how the icons can get washed out in the bright colors. Like yourself I build scenarios on the detailed maps and usually play them with just borders and coastlines off. Otherwise it's bright colors on bright background and it's easy to lose them.

Same here. Love OpenTopoMap but need to be able to swap colors for at least the text.

Mike

Posted: **Wed Oct 11, 2023 11:38 pm**

Is there a discussion or and announcement that answers why this is going on and if replacements are free?? Did this come out of the blue?

Posted: **Thu Oct 12, 2023 2:00 am**

It’s in the patch notes…

Stamen implemented a paywall.

Posted: **Thu Oct 12, 2023 4:22 am**

I actually quite like the new OpenTopoMap, perhaps even more than the Stamen maps. My main issues with it are 1) the white UI text is impossible to read on the white land background, 2) the blue Allied color is impossible to see on most ocean backgrounds, and 3) place names are localized: I can't read any of the Chinese city names (for example).

(1) and (2) could probably be fixed if we could change the colors of the relevant UI elements. (3) actually doesn't bother me all that much (as I usually turned off the placename layer anyway, and can always use Google maps / Wikipedia to research a place).

Posted: **Thu Oct 12, 2023 12:04 pm**

Kushan04 wrote: Thu Oct 12, 2023 2:00 am It’s in the patch notes…

Stamen implemented a paywall.

Has the dev team provided a link to buy and install these key tiles? Or do we have to figure that out? Thanks.

Kevin

Posted: **Thu Oct 12, 2023 12:08 pm**

I would say that having place names is good from a scenario design perspective, especially in inland areas where it's harder to key off coastlines to work out where you're looking at. I'm working on some scenarios in deepest Angola and the absence of place names with the new update made it pretty hard to work out where I was looking at until I could put some airbases and radar stations in that marked where the major towns were. For my use localised place names would be fine because Angola uses the Latin alphabet, but for many areas I appreciate this approach wouldn't work as well.

Regarding the text colours for OpenTopoMap, would it be easier to change the display colour of land and water in their tile set than it would be to change the colour scheme used by Command based on what map mode you're using?

Posted: **Thu Oct 12, 2023 12:31 pm**

kevinkins wrote: Thu Oct 12, 2023 12:04 pm Has the dev team provided a link to buy and install these key tiles? Or do we have to figure that out? Thanks.

So Stamen went to Stadia Maps and they are now the host. It is now a Saas setup with no allowed free commercial usage. I think it would be challenging to justify the dev resources to support something that the end user would have to secure Stamen-Stadia API access to use.

https://stamen.com/here-comes-the-futur ... amen-maps/

Posted: **Thu Oct 12, 2023 3:06 pm**

This may be a continuous challenge as long as the service providers see a significant amount of traffic being pulled by CMO users. You'd like to think its just to cover traffic costs but it is more likely they see 20,000 potential customers. I don't blame them-capitalism and all. Do feel for the CMO devs having to react to whatever a third party does. Par for the course though.

Mike

Posted: **Thu Oct 12, 2023 5:02 pm**

TitaniumTrout wrote: Thu Oct 12, 2023 12:31 pm
kevinkins wrote: Thu Oct 12, 2023 12:04 pm Has the dev team provided a link to buy and install these key tiles? Or do we have to figure that out? Thanks.
So Stamen went to Stadia Maps and they are now the host. It is now a Saas setup with no allowed free commercial usage. I think it would be challenging to justify the dev resources to support something that the end user would have to secure Stamen-Stadia API access to use.

https://stamen.com/here-comes-the-futur ... amen-maps/

So i see guys are trying to find work arounds. But is the game broken as released without buying the the Stamens ? I guess I would buy, but I don't know what to buy, where to find them, and how to install.

Kevin

Posted: **Thu Oct 12, 2023 5:10 pm**

Broken? Not really. You just don't get the placenames layer. This isn't the sort of thing you buy, like a product, but the sort of thing you purchase as a service. Even then it's access to a server and dependent on usage. Not something an individual game owner is going to convert.

For the moment I'm using OpenTopoMap layer to get place-names info as needed or custom layers from SAS.Planet.

kevinkins wrote: Thu Oct 12, 2023 5:02 pm
TitaniumTrout wrote: Thu Oct 12, 2023 12:31 pm
kevinkins wrote: Thu Oct 12, 2023 12:04 pm Has the dev team provided a link to buy and install these key tiles? Or do we have to figure that out? Thanks.
So Stamen went to Stadia Maps and they are now the host. It is now a Saas setup with no allowed free commercial usage. I think it would be challenging to justify the dev resources to support something that the end user would have to secure Stamen-Stadia API access to use.

https://stamen.com/here-comes-the-futur ... amen-maps/
So i see guys are trying to find work arounds. But is the game broken as released without buying the the Stamens ? I guess I would buy, but I don't know what to buy, where to find them, and how to install.

Kevin

Posted: **Thu Oct 12, 2023 6:31 pm**

boogabooga wrote: Tue Oct 10, 2023 8:47 pm
Is there any consideration to try to make this [paywall Stadmen] some kind of paid extra, like tacview?

Edit:

This is from their website that Dimitris linked:

How much does it cost?

Once you have signed up for an account with Stadia, your cost is based on tile usage, meaning how many map tiles are requested through your app or website.

If your current usage is less than 200,000 tiles / month—FREE for non-commercial use
If your usage goes above 200,000 tiles / month or you are a commercial user—plans start at $20/month. The full pricing is here.
You can reduce costs by upgrading to vector tiles. An in-depth guide to switching is available here.

Two questions.

1) What is 200,000 tiles in CMO terms? Is that one user worth? More than the entire community? Doesn't even cover Monaco?
2) Would individual CMO users be considered "commercial? Would the license be at the Matrix level or the user level?
[/quote]

Posted: **Thu Oct 12, 2023 8:25 pm**

TitaniumTrout wrote: Thu Oct 12, 2023 5:10 pm Broken? Not really. You just don't get the placenames layer. This isn't the sort of thing you buy, like a product, but the sort of thing you purchase as a service. Even then it's access to a server and dependent on usage. Not something an individual game owner is going to convert.

For the moment I'm using OpenTopoMap layer to get place-names info as needed or custom layers from SAS.Planet.

kevinkins wrote: Thu Oct 12, 2023 5:02 pm
TitaniumTrout wrote: Thu Oct 12, 2023 12:31 pm

So Stamen went to Stadia Maps and they are now the host. It is now a Saas setup with no allowed free commercial usage. I think it would be challenging to justify the dev resources to support something that the end user would have to secure Stamen-Stadia API access to use.

https://stamen.com/here-comes-the-futur ... amen-maps/
So i see guys are trying to find work arounds. But is the game broken as released without buying the the Stamens ? I guess I would buy, but I don't know what to buy, where to find them, and how to install.

Kevin

Ah, thanks for the explanation. Which patch notes does this come to light in? I would think the most recent.

Posted: **Fri Oct 13, 2023 12:42 am**

How does one add OpenTopoMap layer to the CMO?

Posted: **Fri Oct 13, 2023 1:09 am**

Dragnaath wrote: Fri Oct 13, 2023 12:42 am How does one add OpenTopoMap layer to the CMO?

Posted: **Fri Oct 13, 2023 2:10 am**

Thank You

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