mapSpain
mapSpain's 1.0.0 broke every user cache to get the package onto modern foundations.
Comparison · Analytics
dggridR vs spatstat.geom
A side-by-side editorial comparison of dggridR and spatstat.geom — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
dggridR vs spatstat.geom: at a glance
What is dggridR?
A discrete global grid generator grew cell traversal and became a usable spatial index.
dggridR builds discrete global grids — icosahedral tessellations of the Earth into equal-area hexagonal or triangular cells — by wrapping the DGGRID C++ engine. The 4.1.0 release adds dgneighbors, dgchildren and dgparent for moving between adjacent cells and across resolutions, plus dgpoints_to_cells and dgbin_points for mapping and aggregating point data into cells. New aperture 7 and mixed-aperture ISEA43H grid types arrive alongside them.
What is spatstat.geom?
The geometry layer under spatstat, steadily absorbing 3D patterns and missing-data semantics
spatstat.geom holds the spatial data structures and geometric operations the rest of the spatstat family builds on — windows, tessellations, images, point patterns and the operations that move between them. Recent releases split their attention between extending those structures to three dimensions and hardening the discretisation code where polygonal geometry meets a pixel grid. 3.8-2 adds more capabilities for three-dimensional point patterns.
dggridR vs spatstat.geom: editorial side-by-side
dggridR
0.0ANALYTICS
A discrete global grid generator grew cell traversal and became a usable spatial index.
◆ Current state
dggridR builds discrete global grids — icosahedral tessellations of the Earth into equal-area hexagonal or triangular cells — by wrapping the DGGRID C++ engine. The 4.1.0 release adds dgneighbors, dgchildren and dgparent for moving between adjacent cells and across resolutions, plus dgpoints_to_cells and dgbin_points for mapping and aggregating point data into cells. New aperture 7 and mixed-aperture ISEA43H grid types arrive alongside them.
◆ Where it's heading
The package changed hands in effect as well as in code: the 4.0.0 engine update to DGGRID v9.0b and the first real test suite were contributed by Sebastian Krantz, who also maintains the upstream engine fork, and 4.1.0's feature burst followed two weeks later. The direction of that burst is unmistakable — away from generating grids for plotting and toward using them as an indexing structure that point data gets binned into and navigated through.
◆ Prediction
Expect the cell hierarchy functions to extend to non-hexagonal apertures and multi-level traversal, closing the remaining gaps against established global indexing systems.
spatstat.geom
2.5ANALYTICS
The geometry layer under spatstat, steadily absorbing 3D patterns and missing-data semantics
◆ Current state
spatstat.geom holds the spatial data structures and geometric operations the rest of the spatstat family builds on — windows, tessellations, images, point patterns and the operations that move between them. Recent releases split their attention between extending those structures to three dimensions and hardening the discretisation code where polygonal geometry meets a pixel grid. 3.8-2 adds more capabilities for three-dimensional point patterns.
◆ Where it's heading
Two threads run through this window. The first is a family-wide push into 3D that originated in the simulation package and has now reached the geometry layer. The second is a slower semantic change: 3.5-0 introduced missing or unavailable (NA) spatial objects, and 3.6-0 followed with more facilities for handling them, meaning an absent window or image became a representable value rather than an error. Around both, the plotting and discretisation code accretes steadily — nonlinear colour maps, plot backgrounds, transparency control, signed distance transforms, and repeated attention to boundary pixels.
◆ Prediction
Expect the 3D surface here to keep filling in behind the simulation package rather than leading it, given that 3.8-2 follows the 3D simulation release by two months. The entries give no indication that the NA work is finished, since it has already spanned two releases.
Alternatives to dggridR and spatstat.geom
Other Analytics products tracked by Sparkpulse, ranked by recent ship velocity. Each card links to a full editorial trajectory and lets you pivot into a head-to-head comparison with either dggridR or spatstat.geom.
wasserportal
A Berlin groundwater scraper grew a full IoT publishing pipeline in two days.
cheapr
cheapr turned multi-threaded, and its next stop is a C++20 public API.
RadialMR
RadialMR's 2026 release corrects degrees of freedom that had been wrong since documentation.
mrbayes
mrbayes spent 2026 auditing its own Bayesian MR estimators for coding errors.
lineup2
lineup2 ships once every few years, and 2026's release is a logo and a core-count tweak.
See all dggridR alternatives → · See all spatstat.geom alternatives →
Recent activity from dggridR and spatstat.geom
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 20d agospatstat.geomMore three-dimensional point pattern capabilities
- 2mo agospatstat.geomBetter boundary pixel handling when discretising windows
- 3mo agodggridRCell neighbors, parents and children make the grid navigable ⚡
- 3mo agodggridRBundled DGGRID engine updated to v9.0b with a test suite
- 3mo agodggridRMaster merged into development ahead of the 4.0 work
- 6mo agospatstat.geomAnalytic level sets and signed distance transforms
- 10mo agospatstat.geomNA object handling extended; clickpoly gains grid snapping
- 1y agospatstat.geomNA spatial objects, hole removal and connected components
- 1y agospatstat.geomNonlinear colour and symbol maps; half-open quadrat tiles
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between dggridR and spatstat.geom?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. spatstat.geom is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 2.5 vs 0.0), with 0 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. See the at-a-glance table above for a side-by-side breakdown of velocity, recent sparks, and editorial themes.
Is dggridR better than spatstat.geom?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. spatstat.geom is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 2.5 vs 0.0), with 0 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. For your specific use case, the alternatives sections above list other Analytics products to evaluate alongside.
What are the best alternatives to dggridR?
Top dggridR alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "dggridR alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/dggridr for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to spatstat.geom?
Top spatstat.geom alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "spatstat.geom alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/spatstat-geom for the full list with editorial commentary on each.