This project is dead?

[douglasg14b]

The passionate dev seems to have left, and Unity doesn't appear to have hired another to maintain this SDK from what I've read.

No updated since last year, repo activity essentially died > 3 years ago (~may 2020), and the issues & PRs are piling up.

Is there a support lifetime on this before it's deprecated, or is the slow, painful, death the plan? Or are there plans to maintain it?

Unity really should have a support lifetime/agreement for this as this has paying customers, and is advertised as an official SDK on their platform.

[gangstageek]

I'm curious if this is dead or not as well. If so I will probably have to switch to something else

[douglasg14b]

It definitely appears to be. This was more me calling it out because Mapbox appears to have abandoned it, without actually dropping it as a "supported platform". Which is very frustrating,

[Markovicho]

I was contacting the support several times as the current version of the SDK will not be compatible to latest Android Versions anymore. There are minor changes for Android API Level 31 which are not included in the SDK and will cause breaking compile errors. You are fine when creating APKs for older API Levels but you can't upload the app to the store in this case (API Level 33 is required since August 23).

Besides that the support cleary said that there will be no bugfixing for Unity-SDK in the near future at all. Don't know why they are still listing this SDK on their website which is pretty misleading. It's abandoned and just a matter of time until there will be API changes causing the SDK to stop working. It's the same risk on both sides Android and iOS...

I don't know whats the roadmap for mapbox + unity or if they are still looking into this direction at all. Currently Niantic is realsing their own Maps-SDK. You should consider looking into their solution at least for locationbaed apps. For realistic 3D-Terrain it will be more likely Bing-Maps to take a look into :-)

[douglasg14b]

@Markovicho Thanks for the Niantic callout, that looks promising. Assuming it has the usual features & support for the variety of map-based operations mapbox does.

[diogo-garcia]

Pretty sad, I was starting to use mapbox but after trying to compile for Android I started to see problems, I'm looking into testing other solutions...

[astojilj]

It's not dead. We're scoping work for the next release. Please continue using mapbox-unity-sdk. cc @brnkhy.

[jhchnc]

Per https://stackoverflow.com/questions/71682845/mapbox-not-opening-in-unity -- if you're looking for this to instantiate it's core functions, minus AR stuff, you can load the package per instructions and "Just delete AR related things that came with Mapbox such as ARCore,Kit Interface, GoogleARCore, etc folders from your Assets."

This allowed the rest of the package to compile, gave me the Mapbox navigation item, and allows me to use example scenes.

[brnkhy]

It's not dead, we are still working on Unity SDK at Mapbox. We haven't been able to put much time and effort in public repo for a while but behind the scenes we have been working on a new version for some time. Unfortunately I'm not able to give any ETA on that, or I can't even say if it'll be production-ready in short term. That's one of the reasons I couldn't answer these question earlier. But I'm hoping to release at least a public alpha version (minimal features) soon.

Almost all our effort is going into this new work but regarding the issues with current public repo, I pushed a proposed fixed forandroid target api related issues here; https://github.com/mapbox/mapbox-unity-sdk/tree/androidEventsFix

[douglasg14b]

Is the new SDK going to be proprietary & closed source then? Why would work not continue on this repo?

At this point though, I'm sure much trust has been lost. For a commercial project to essentially abandon it's offering for 4 years now, that's dead. Until activity indicates otherwise, and even then, if there is no explicit support policy what's to stop this from happening again?

The lack of communication from Mapbox is loud in this case. If mapbox wants trust in this, then there should be some form of official communication on the state of things...

[brnkhy]

@douglasg14b I agree with all you said; there's a lot of work needs to be done and definitely not all on the technical side.

Our new work is in a private repo simply because it's not ready yet, not even for alpha testing. It's still better for most people to just use last public release (I mean after we fix this android issue, maybe have a cleanup and remove AR etc.). But we also want to share new work as soon as possible as developer feedback is undeniably invaluable.

[enemali]

It's not dead, we are still working on Unity SDK at Mapbox. We haven't been able to put much time and effort in public repo for a while but behind the scenes we have been working on a new version for some time. Unfortunately I'm not able to give any ETA on that, or I can't even say if it'll be production-ready in short term. That's one of the reasons I couldn't answer these question earlier. But I'm hoping to release at least a public alpha version (minimal features) soon.

Almost all our effort is going into this new work but regarding the issues with current public repo, I pushed a proposed fixed forandroid target api related issues here; https://github.com/mapbox/mapbox-unity-sdk/tree/androidEventsFix

How do we try this proposed fixed

[lucasgray]

Any update here? Thinking to dive back into an AR project and I'd rather use Mapbox+Unity, but seems like I should go with an alternative

[sendreams]

Any update here? Thinking to dive back into an AR project and I'd rather use Mapbox+Unity, but seems like I should go with an alternative

any choice？

[Nyphur]

Andrew Sepic from Mapbox has confirmed on their Discord on April 24th that the Unity SDK is dead. "Mapbox is not currently and does not have plans to continue development of the Mapbox Unity SDK. Sorry"

[brnkhy]

@Nyphur We actually are still working on the new version, I think there was a confusion or misunderstanding somewhere on that discord chat. I was hesitant to talk about it as our plans (especially the ETA) wasn't clear and I didn't want to make promises. But at the moment we are planning a small beta version by the end of the year. It'll have what we call "core functionalities"; imagery, terrain, vector but it'll still be a minimal package, unlike the currently public old version. So no AR, no navigation initially etc.

[GMAGD]

will the new version include the beta landmarks "https://api.mapbox.com/v4/mapbox.mapbox-3dbuildings-v1-beta" that is used in mapbox GL

the models are in b3dm and i didn't find a way to integrate myself inside mapbox

[brnkhy]

@GMAGD according to current plan, landmarks will not be in the very first beta version but will follow in next few months. let's say we are hoping to have them in by spring 2025.

[Nyphur]

@brnkhy That's good to hear, the message on Discord seemed pretty unambiguous that it was dead. At this point it may not matter much though, it's been over five years since the SDK worked out of the box and has been actively supported. Most devs seem to have moved on to other tools and platforms and people are now recommending avoiding Mapbox in new projects or using a third party plugin like InfinityCode's Online Maps where needed. Best of luck with the beta, hopefully it's a major improvement!