Does the MVTLoader allow tiles with .pbf extension?

[alaws-USGS]

Hello, I was wondering if the MVTLoader allows tiles with a .pbf extension? Reading the MVTLoader documentation mentions only the .mvt extension but I know both are implementations of the same protobuf protocol, just that .mvt happens to be what Mapbox calls their tiles.

Part of my inquiry is trying to trace the error Worker exception: Error: Unimplemented type: 4 that appears to come from loaders.gl. I can also open an issue if that is a more appropriate channel. Thanks!

[alaws-USGS]

I'm also beginning to wonder if it something on my end with how our .pbf tiles are being served and if there is an issue with the content-type header from the server. Is this potentially causing the browser to send the wrong data type to loaders.gl for parsing?

[alaws-USGS]

I figured out the answer to my issue. The tiles were created using tippecanoe, which does not create tiles where geometries are not present. So, for our dataset that did not have geometries edge to edge, tiles weren't created for the corners. The content-type from the server was of text/html and this was handled in Deck.gl's MVTLayer by overwriting its base fetch method with the following function:

// imports
import { MVTLoader } from '@loaders.gl/mvt';
import { parse } from '@loaders.gl/core';

// types
import type { Loader, LoaderOptions } from '@loaders.gl/core';

// This function handles calls for tiles that don't exist, since some datasets
// are not perfectly square or have features edge-to-edge, which results in a
// tile not being created in that space. Currently, loaders.gl will throw an
// unimplemented error due to the content-type returned from non-existent tiles.
export const HandleFetchNonExistentTilesForMVTLayer = async (
  url: string,
  {
    loaders,
    loadOptions,
    signal,
  }: {
    loaders?: Loader[];
    loadOptions?: LoaderOptions;
    signal?: AbortSignal;
  }
) => {
  const response = await fetch(url, {
    signal,
  });

  const contentType = response.headers.get('content-type');
  if (contentType !== 'application/x-protobuf') {
    // non-existent tiles pass text/html to content-type header
    return;
  }
  return parse(
    response,
    loaders && loaders.length ? loaders[0] : MVTLoader, //specify MVT loader unless another one is passed
    loadOptions!
  );
};