kircher1
commented
4 years ago Hi @keenanwoodall, thanks for checking out the SDK!
For now, using the HttpTextureTileLayer is a good solution since you can pull down pre-rasterized tiles to convey the vector data. Although quality-wise, I understand a raster tile approach is not nearly as ideal as rendering the vectors directly.
Broadly speaking, the SDK should have some support for rendering primitives like lines and polygons in the future. Having support for this would go a long ways to help lay the groundwork for rendering vector data-- No specific time line for this, but it is on our roadmap!
In the meantime, if you want to attempt to read certain types of primitives out of a vector data tile, you may be able to get fairly far using the MapPin system. This system allows you to anchor arbitrary Unity GameObjects to the map at a specified lat-lon, and it automatically enables or disables the pin when it is inside or outside the map's view. This MapPin system also handles resampling the elevations of these objects to keep them pinned at an altitude offset relative to the surface of the terrain, which would be especially useful if the vector data you are reading does not contain altitude values. (If you are using flat-mode for the map, i.e. no terrain elevations or 3D cities, this is a non-issue).
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For point-based vector data, converting to these MapPins (I'm thinking like city labels, business locations, icons, etc) would be fairly straight forward. Leveraging components like TextMeshPro would be a great way to get clean text rendering. Rendering 2D icons with this system should also be quite straight forward.
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Lines (for streets, highways, routes etc) would be a bit more tricky with the MapPin system although doable. You could create a pin for each point in the line and periodically update the vertices of the line based on the pins sample altitudes.
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For polygonal vector data, I don't have a good suggestion. It would probably be quite a bit of work, but in theory, you could implement a custom TextureTileLayer that rasterizes polygons to 2D textures on the fly. You could use Unity render textures although I'm not sure how efficient or simple it would be since it would require triangulating the data. Ideally this would be leveraging some sort of 2D rasterization library (like D2D).
In any case, perf may become an issue if the vector data is especially dense.
Note there are also extension methods on the MapRenderer to transform LatLons and Mercator coordinates to 3D world or local space positions for the current map view. This would be useful if you are working outside of the MapPin system, but it won't help manage the task of adjusting elevations of objects you want to pin to the map, for that, you would have to use a MapPin. Again though, elevation sampling is non-issue if you are using flat-mode.
That's a lot, but hopefully points you in the right direction!
keenanwoodall
YohanBaillot
mlathrop-bell
peterclemenko
juvelez
First off I want to say thanks for making such a polished product. This is miles better than every other mapping solution I've tried. The editor controls are great and the API is very clean. Great work 👍
I'm using an Http Texture Tile Layer to display custom tiles styled in Mapbox and am curious if there'd be a way to make a custom Tile Layer for displaying vector data.
I'm assuming a custom tile layer is the best approach, but am open to anything.
[edit] To clarify - while having a vector data layer built into the sdk would be great I understand that's a big ask, so that's not really what I'm requesting. If I were to develop a system for parsing and drawing vector tiles, where would be the best place in the sdk to hook in?