missing vector tiles?

[mpickell]

I apologize if this is in the wrong place or if this is a something i should have read somewhere.. i'm new to web mapping and i'm still grasping its conventions.

I'm rendering the mapbox vector tiles into separate layers on my own, so the layers can be turned on and off or arranged (zIndex-like) independently and I have noticed that there are no vector tiles for parts of the ocean (at zoom levels 9+?), and also i have noticed some tiles missing in-land. An example for water is [9/160/206] and for inland is [15/8265/13216]. For these I get a "404 - Not Found" and a response '{"message":"Tile does not exist"}'. It seems to me that this is occurring in the water where it does not intersect any other layers (like 'landforms'), and the same for inland -- where there are no features to display.

My question: Is there a standard way to handle this? In the middle of the water, I would want to place just a solid polygon and fill it my water fill color. Over the land, i would want to do the same but fill it with the landform color. Is there a common technique for identifying these and handling these missing tiles? (Is this related to "overzooming"? i.e., am i supposed to looking back in lower-value zoom levels to get the data?)

[jfirebaugh]

Hi @mpickell. You are correct, the way you would currently need to handle this is by loading tiles from a lower zoom level to cover the gap. In the future we may change the vector tile API to avoid serving 404s for "empty" tiles, which would eliminate this gotcha.