Maps In Unity 3D - Share your experience

Hi Guys,

I’m starting this thread to know more about your experience with maps in Unity, whether you are using GO Map or a different map asset.

When I published GO Map, about a year and a half ago, it was one of the first assets to make maps in Unity, probably the first to be a location-based game oriented map and not a classic “slippy” map.

By that time I kept evolving my asset constantly, adding new features, new themes and integration with other map services mostly following my roadmap but also listening to the feedbacks I’ve received from GO Map users and their projects.
Some of these implementations, such as street names, layer masks and indoor atlas SDK integration were developed in order to help users realize their own projects.


I think it would be a great idea to start this dialogue here too, on the Unity Forum, so I can hear more about what you think of maps on Unity 3D, what your projects are about and, why not, which map assets are you using and why.

Feel free to suggest new features, report bugs or compare GO Map with other assets you used.

GO Map goal will always be to make a very easy-to-use, but complete map plugin, with no customization code needed, to build awesome looking maps.

Bye
Alan

 

Hi Alan,

We're just about to launch MechFightAR featuring GOMaps!
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.animateobjects.mechfightar&hl=en

The latest version of GoMaps is really terrific. We've tried a bunch of other mapping solutions and even created our own but your has been consistent updated and that helps us not have to worry about the mapping part. Losing MapZen was a bummer, but you've got it covered with multiple providers.

Happy to be part of your new community.









- Team Animate Objects

 

Hi!

Wow your game looks really cool, thanks for sharing your project!

The Mapzen shutdown was absolutely the most tragic event I've faced since GO Map came out, many developers relied on their service and had to swap to another in less than a month. Luckily the ones who were using GO Map didn't have to do much work to change to mapbox or another map service. =)

Do you have any suggestion for a feature that you'd want to see in the next GO Map releases?

Bye
Alan

 

https://maps-apis.googleblog.com/2018/03/the-real-world-as-your-playground-build.html

Google made / is making? Google Maps APIs for Unity. I'm excited.

 

That's indeed exciting news, mostly because Google never had a vector map API for us to develop maps in unity.
I think their strategy will be to release their data only through their Unity sdk, but if (finger crossed) there will be an open vector map api it would mean we will likely have Google data in GO Map too.

 

I haven't had time to fully dig into the newest release, but is there an easy "hook" or trigger to know when all tiles are done loading?

 

Hi!

Yes there is, check out the new "Flat Map - Loading Screen" demo scene where I used a simple GOMap event to check when all tiles are done loading and animate a loading screen.

Check the video here

 

Hey! I wasn't sure where to get support for this. The asset is wonderful so far!

I was curious if it was possible to ping a GPS coordinate for it's metadata? Ex. Get landuse of current coordinate?

 

Hey thanks!

You should be able to get every feature's data from its GOFeature object using a simple raycast script.
First thing first enable colliders, and maybe layer masks, on the layers you want to query from the GOMap inspector. Then you could easily edit the "GOCoordinatesRaycast" script to get the gameobject hit and it's GOFeature component.

By the way you can contact me directly through my website for this kind of questions,
Bye
Alan

 

We'd like to see improved handling of textures for the buildings including the sides and roof. The sides should repeat at a normal evenly divisible interval and the roof texture should align to the angle of the sides of the building if possible. I think GoMaps is only pushing the texture diagonally through the buildings (a trick which only goes so far). Also would be nice to figure out how to do some better seems for the roads. Adding terrain of course complicates everything as well. This would give a more natural feel to the procedural generated scenes. Some of the other commercial products have been working on these features, it would be nice to see here as well.

 

Hi, thanks for the feedback!

I'm always trying to improve the rendering process of GoMap and in the last release I've published a whole new roads generation system that is way better than before, now you have rounded ends and smooth curves.
I'm aware that the elevation adds complexity to the process and roads may not stick together perfectly, I'll keep pushing that part.

About the buildings... It's hard to find a rule that works for every building/part rooftop shape. The sides should already repeat the texture at fixed intervals (10 meters), that's a nice compromise to keep the verts count low.

By the way if you want to have a more technical chat about that send me an email!
Bye

 

Hi,

A new GoMap release is about to be reviewed and released on the asset store and it will feature most of the feedbacks I've received here! I have to say that the UV Mapping was a struggle but I'm really happy that you guys pushed me to review this part of my asset because the results are really great.

Thanks to everybody and keep coming up with ideas and feedbacks.

So @aobjects , about the UV mapping I've decided to come up with many mapping styles and let you select the right one for each layer:



And here it is a brief explanation of the new UV mapping styles:

This two styles are very good for landuse or everything that is extruded but it's not a building:

Top and Sides Repeated (look at the extruded green area) will repeat the textures on both top and sides of the mesh, classic and clean.



Top Repeated and Sides Stretched will stretch the texture on the mesh sides. Personally I find that effect really cool and "low-poly style" and I've used this for the city demo scene.


When it comes to buildings we have 3 modes:

Top Centered Sides RATIO will put a single texture not repeated as the building roof and will repeat the sides keeping a 1:1 ratio between height and width of each texture. That's my choice for buildings but the other modes could be useful too.


Top Centered Sides Fit will put a single texture not repeated as the building roof and also a SINGLE texture not repeated for each building side. It might look weird with this kind of textures but I will make a new city theme that will use this kind of mapping.



Top Fit Sides Fit it's basically the same of the last one with a slightly different placing of rooftops. That's really up to you to see if it's better or not with your roof textures.



As you may see from all this screenshots the Roads UV maps were improved a lot too. Now the repeating is smooth and it's really easier for you to create your own road textures.

Here's a picture of upcoming new city theme, I hope you enjoy it.
Bye
Alan

 

Really great update! Getting best results so far with "Top Centered and sides fit". The roads are much better and the building textures are a big improvement. I can get road labels again, which seemed to be broken for us for a bit. One thing I might ask for is to have a list (array) of roof material options just like the buildings to give some more variety. It might be better to tie them to the particular building side texture or just random (a toggle between the 2 modes?).

I noticed that I do that Paris scene and use elevation. the "Arc de Triumphe" get mangled.

Also, any directions on upgrading existing projects with older GoMaps?

Thanks Alan. Great tool.

 

Can I use this asset to load offline OSM data? Could I use it to load data from the Planet.osm file that OpenStreetMaps.org releases? This asset looks promising, and the one restriction I have is that my project will be an offline standalone PC build, so I must load all of my data from disk.

Thank you,
Jake

 

Hi, from some reason i cannot find the "UV mapping" options although I have the latest version. where can i find it exactly?

Plus, Can you add support for "Slippy Map"? I need my app to also have a mode for exploring the map top view, with touch gestures to zoom in/out and move around. yes, exactly like slippy map but with my Go Map theme

 

Hello,

We are using your plugin for a location based card game. Unfortunately sometime when playing from a car in movement we have some grey tiles appearing. It's like the game doesn't load them. Is there any solutions to avoid this kind of issue?

Thanks,

 

That's already in progress, I also get bored by the same roof texture on every building! =)

 

Answering other questions:

@avigo: It might happen that if you don't use the right version of Unity to download the asset you get to download an older version instead of the latest release. I already reported that issue in the publishers forum but maybe @AndrewAssetStore can give us an answer about this?

@apocalypsehunters: I've answered to your question via email, but I'd love to read here what you think about GoMap and your experience making a real game using it! it would be great for other users, thanks!

@BobBobson108: I think I've answered to you too via email. Anyway honestly I don't think it's a good idea to have the whole world map data in a local file and make GoMap read from it. You can already do a trick to prefill the GoMap cache with tiles to have an "offline" portion of the world, as explained here. I think that is the best option you have on a mobile app that needs offline mapping.

Bye
Alan

 

Thanks Alan. I did not get your email reply, but I had a similar thought and wound up just using PostgreSQL to host the planet file.

 

What do you think about this retrowave theme?
I believe that's a very interesting way to use the "top fit size fit" UV mapping mode for buildings.

 

Looks good, was looking for a Tron style map to add to the many projects we have in development using GoMap.
Alan is awesome *Big thumbs up*

R.A.I.D.
Development Team

 

Thanks man =)

 

Okay looks good.

 

Hey Alan,

We love this asset so far! We had it working a few months ago with the GPS tracking, maps, and POIs when it was in Mapzen.

Now that we’ve switched to Mapbox, the POIs only show up in the Unity editor, not in a build to an iPhone.

Anyone know how to fix? Or anyone else have the same problem?

 

Hi @Blastov, I’ve never had this problem or have it reported by someone but I’ll take a look to it!
Do you have errors in the xcode console?
However you can email me directly if you prefer, use the contact form from my website.
Bye
Alan

 

Thanks for the quick response Alan! I’ll send you a dm right now!

 

1. Can you detect objects before you collide with them?

edit: removed a question, documentation provided answer.

 

Product looks fantastic, however the API usage, per provider, seems like an absolute minefield to me. Can your product support your own servers api using osm map download (as per osm documentation).

edit: I think mapbox free will be fine for nearly everyone, unless your game is a huge success (please), in which case you most likely wouldn't care about the added cost of extra api calls.

edit edit: With regards to Mapbox, assuming free apps includes apps with in-app purchases.

 

Anyone found a solution for the player stopping every few steps. Even when we are still moving?

EDIT: I just increased the time in MoveAvatar.Move and it worked out for me.

 

Is it possible working with the generated data offline in editor, to recreate a city with more details?
I would like to get the roads of some 20km X 20km area in editor to replace them with my hand made models, buildings etc, to get a manual edited scene with a more realistic approach (it would be divided into chunks in separate scenes, manually if needed). I'm interested in getting the road data and buildings, not the online generation right now.

If this is possible I'm buying it, seems awesome!