MapzenGo Part 7 : Plugins

Well yes, I decided to change the name of the series to simply “MapzenGo”. It’s shorter and admittedly, “PokemonGo clone” was a bit of a click bait. But hey, advertisement eh??
Anyway, we have another big update here. Mainly infrastructure stuff but I think you’ll all find them useful.

Good old Manhattan

-Major thing here is the new plugin system. Well I changed the factories a bit…again but nothing big really. First of all, I introduced a new base class called “Plugin”. It has a simple “Create” function and will be used for both factories and additional… plugins. So plugins are classes which operates on Tiles. Simple as that. Factories take tiles and creates buildings, roads etc. Other plugins, takes tiles and puts map images on them, add custom objects, maybe create forests or something.

So now you can create a class, inherit it from plugin, fill up the create method and put it under the World object in the scene. It’ll work right away.
That being said, I’m not done with refactoring the factories yet, I’ll remove the create from base factory class and leave that part to sub classes as well. That won’t effect the plugin system though, you’ll be able to work on your own plugins unaffected.

-Then I implement as very simple CustomObjectPlugin. People has been asking about how to visualized their own custom locations for weeks now. And yes it wasn’t really straight forward how to convert lat/long to unity3d position but this new plugin should help you with that. It’s just a sample really, nothing fancy going on there and you’ll probably need something much more complex for your needs but this should be enough to get you started.

-Then there is a great editor script, written by Roman (thanks mate!), to search places and use their lat/long right away. Admittedly I haven’t checked the code in detail but it uses Mapzen search api to find places, retrieve their lat/long and pass it to the tile manager. It’s so much easier now to navigate between different places, be it Manhatta, Paris or Istanbul.

So much easier to test different place now.

-And I also fixed namespaces to match file locations. Should have done this much earlier, no idea how I missed it.

-Oh wait I actually forgot the biggest thing, entity settings and filtering! Well I did talked about this a little in previous posts but extended it a lot since then.
Ok, what is it? Remember, we didn’t have much chance to customize stuff before; hust some hard coded materials which wasn’t enough for anything really. No chance to set road widths, materials by building type etc.
So we have a new settings system to fix that! If you check the factory objects in the scene, you’ll see that there is a new Settings list under it. Using that list, you can customize, let’s say highway roads width or religious buildings material.

Even better, some factories (not all) are using those settings to filter entities, i.e. Road factory won’t render “ferry” routes if you don’t have a settings for that! This saves us from all the mess in big cities and helps us get a cleaner look. If I recall correctly, only building factory doesn’t use this filtering method. Building factory will render every single building and use custom settings on selected typed buildings.
We have only a few customization properties for now but it’s quite easy to add anything whenever we need. Ah and Roman is also working on moving all those settings to ScriptableObjects, it’ll get much easier to use as well.

Stockholm

And that’s all for now I guess. I’ll try to look into gps, UV maps and other stuff next few weeks, no promises though, day job is getting quite intense these days.

Let me know what you think! You can mail me, post here or create issues on MapzenGo Github page. I also added a donation button at the right column (and at the bottom of this post), consider that as buying me a coffee or a beer. Oh I can definitely use a weihenstephaner right now…

Cheers,
Baran

MapzenGo Github Page
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Download MapzenGo Part 7: Plugins

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