Map Tiles For Sydney

Contact me at DanielLyons.net. I'm working on providing different styles of maps for Sydney (from Newcastle to Wollongong). See my current slippy map for examples of my work. The map on the home page is a visualisation platform where you can see what layers you want and then use the slippy map JavaScript called Overlayer to display the tiles on your own website (granny flat builder's website, real estate website, etc.).

Why The Name Castlemap?

In Australia there was a popular 1997 film called "The Castle" which referred to a hard working man and his house which he loved. Australians sometimes like to refer to their houses as castles.

Technology Used

The Javascript used for the mapping engine is 95?% my code. Software like Leaflet, OpenLayers, and Mapbox GL required too much work to integrate things like toggling overlapping data layers in a certain order. The backend Javascript I use bulk creates SVG tiles using simple trigonometry to rotate complex shapes like SVG floor plans. Then I use Inkscape command line to bulk convert the tiles to small raster PNG tiles. The specialized GIS software (not QGIS, MapTiler, or GDAL) I created needed to to have different settings for different zoom levels and remove data no needed for a Sydney housing data set. For exmaple, the land zoning overlayer/filter when zoomed out has just the "2-3 letter zoning code" however when you zoom in it describes what the zone includes (e.g. shop-top housing, mid-rise apartments). The large spatial datasets are handled by "super quick and strict" PostgreSQL while the smaller datasets by "slower but more user friendly" MariaDB and phpMyAdmin. Castlemap full version is a PHP/HTML/CSS file but the simplier Overlayer.js files for builders, real estates, etc. can work with just simple HTML and CSS (no PHP).