I know it has been a while since the last update on MapzenGo, sorry about that. I had lots of stuff going on and couldn’t find time to blog in that rush. Well actually title says it all right? MapzenGo project landed me a new awesome job at Mapbox and now I’ll be doing pretty much the same thing, map/city generation in Unity for them! OK maybe not New Horizons cool but it’s still pretty fucking cool, eh?
Mapbox is a huge custom map provider and they’ve been one of the top player in the scene for years. They have some awesome terrain (height), vector, satellite imagery APIs and most of their project are open source and hosted on Github! Now they (well it’s “we” now I guess) are going into gaming scene and started this Mapbox SDK for Unity3D project a short while ago. Aaannnd before you ask, yes, this SDK will be open source after the launch as well!
So that’s pretty much the whole story I guess, let’s try this for the rest;
-What will you be doing there?
I’ll mostly do the mesh generation and unity integration, so same as MapzenGO.
-What will happen to MapzenGo?
It really isn’t an easy job building worlds from scratch, there’s millions of thing to do. I can’t do it all for two project at the same time so I’ll switch MapzenGo to maintanence mode. I’ll keep fixing bugs and answering everything as much as I can but I won’t add new features and stuff anymore. It’ll be like an “Introduction to GeoJson mesh generation in Unity3D”. Again Mapbox will be open source anyway so you won’t miss out on anything!
-And blog posts?
I probably won’t have much time for detailed technical posts, at least until the release. I’ll post images, videos or anything though. I’ll keep this blog alive and try to write technical stuff as much as I can. Meanwhile you can follow me on Twitter for updates and mail me for anything. You may already know that I love talking, so don’t hesitate to say hi!
Thanks for everything guy, it has been awesome working on MapzenGo and doing this blog. Please try out the Mapbox SDK Unity beta and tell us what you think. It’s a developer tool afterall, your feedback is extremely important for us.
Cheers,
Baran
Hello Baran, I’ve been taking references from your project from early last year. I’m inspired to know that your work has led you to greater heights. Its also great to see the world of open source coming together quite beautifully, and I aim to make my contributions someday.
I’ll make an attempt to use this final version of MapzenGo in my project, but I can’t wait until the you guys at Mapbox release the Unity SDK.
Thank you, and best regards and wishes for the new year.
Hey David!
Thanks for you kind words, MapzenGo has been a great experience for me as well. Please do not hesitate to contribute (to any open source project in that matter), it gets much more fun with more people!
Happy new year and best regards.
This is so cool! I’m gad to see your contributions to the community have resulted in a job that’s hopefully less stressful and more in line with what you want to be doing.
Has any information been released yet about pricing or usage? It doesn’t look like there’s anything Unity-specific since I don’t think “50,000 map views” really applies.
Anyway, I’m very excited to follow the progress of this SDK. Best of luck and may you stay safe under a Trump regime
Hey Jake, thanks a lot. It really is awesome working with Mapbox!
I’m really not sure about the pricing, development has been incredibly fast last few weeks so couldn’t catch up with those stuff. You’ll recieve a support email if you register the beta though, you can ask through that for the best/correct answers on pricing.
Thanks again!
Dude, congratulations on the job! Hope it’s working out well for you 🙂
Can we dare hope for a final blog post about moving the player position in the real world? Thanks for the blogs, they’ve been a great read.
Hey there!
I’m really sorry for the late reply, I really didn’t had much time to check my blog lately 🙁
Have you checked the latest version of Mapbox Unity SDK? I haven’t done much GPS stuff my but colleagues did and I believe we have it in the latest version here; https://github.com/mapbox/mapbox-unity-sdk
Hope that helps!
Oh well that sucks for us. Good for you getting a job tho.
This project was perfect for an idea I had but I can’t program all these things myself. I wanted a Sim City / City Skylines kind of render of real world cities where I can have a player build their own buildings / replace buildings and transport goods between cities with real world distances.
Gotta put that idea on the backburner I guess.
Thanks! Mapbox Unity SDK is far superior to good old MapzenGo though, have you checked it?
Hey Baran,
With the news that Mapzen is shutting down, I was wondering if you could offer some insight into how to use the Mapbox Unity SDK to achieve the following:
When creating a game, we want an authoritative server to prevent clients cheating. Consider that we have a game where users can walk around our virtual world and construct buildings. The flow might look like this:
1) Client changes location so requests new tiles from our server.
2) Our server performs validation (making sure they’re not spoofing location, etc.) and checks the server cache for the tile. If not found, it requests the tile from Mapzen and stores it in the cache.
3) Server returns tile to client.
4) Client tells server it wants to construct a building at location (x, y)
5) Server edits the GeoJSON of our cached tile to include the new building.
6) Server returns tile to client.
The Mapbox Unity SDK seems to make it difficult to put a server in the middle. Is this the case? If not, would you be so kind as to describe how I could achieve the above flow, using Mapbox?
I’m really sorry I saw this more than a year late 🙁 I really didn’t take care of my blog at all in 2018. Have you find answers to your questions? Let me know if you still have any questions, I’ll try to answer asap this time 🙂