Vibe code a small “Night Lights Globe” demo

[romainoir]

Hi everyone,

I’ve been experimenting with MapLibre GL JS and the globe projection and ended up hacking together a little “Night Lights Globe” demo. It combines:

• MapLibre GL JS in globe projection, with OpenFreemap basemap data
• Mapterhorn elevation tiles for terrain, hillshade, and contours ! thx for this awesome data
• Urban “night lights / urban heat” styling using heatmaps (residential / roads / buildings) and vector glow layers
• A time & date control panel (day-of-year + local time) that drives lighting, a day/night terminator, and simple sun / moon markers using SunCalc

Repo:
Live demo: Maplibre-Globe

This was mostly “vibecoded” from the MapLibre examples plus a lot of help from ChatGPT Codex, so I’m sure there are things that could be better structured. If this is useful to you, feel free to reuse, fork, or rip apart any piece of it for your own projects.

Thanks for all the work on MapLibre, it’s been a lot of fun building this.

[HarelM]

Thanks for sharing! Can you also post this in the slack channel? I think it looks very cool!

[romainoir]

yes I can !
I was not aware of the Slack channel.
Indeed it might be a better place for sharing ;)

[HarelM]

Both are great places and serve different purpose 😀

[jo-chemla]

Indeed a nice looking demo! I think your Z/Y axes are inverted, the sun azimuth position does look correct but not the day/night shadow!

In case you're interested, just did a similar terrain explorer which compares mapterhorn with other terrarium/terrainrgb/cog sources - mapterhorn stays higher-res on some areas, and lower-res on others), used as terrain/hillshade/hypso and contours + raster, demo here