Hey everyone, it has been a while but here I am with a huge update; single mesh layers, continuous roads, water&parks and more!

First of all, yea I know I shouldn’t be doing such huge updates and refactoring but I couldn’t help it this time. I got greedy and keep adding stuff. I’ll try to post smaller stuff more frequently from now on. I’m also sorry for the huge refactoring going on, it’s probably break everything if you built your stuff on previous versions but, trust me, totally worth it!

So what do we have here; (by here I mean; https://github.com/brnkhy/MapzenGo please do follow the github page as well, you can find latest fixes and stuff there.)

1) Single mesh layers is easily the biggest thing in this post. As you may remember, every single entity was a separate GameObject before which caused horrible performance and fps. I was having issues even with 9 crowded tiles (see Paris) using that method.

What I did was simply merging meshes of same type entities under one single gameobject. For example, all buildings in a tile is single GameObject now. Or all roads, or parks. So instead thousands of small gameobject in every single tile, we have 4 now; Buildings, Roads, Water, Parks.

What’s the catch? Well you won’t be able to click&select buildings anymore. If you were planning anything like that, it might be better not to use layers (or handle click position and building relations differently in the background). And the tile creation is NOT threaded yet so it’ll stutter a little during the initial loading process. I’ll look into that as soon as possible as well.

Oh and you can activate/deactivate this thing from World Settings so you can still stick with the old system if you want!

See? This was pretty much impossible in previous versions but now you can enjoy the view in 70+ fps no problem (hopefully)

2) Continuous roads. Well not too continuous though. Let me explain; Mapzen road data is kinda hard to work with, it’s not a graph, not even properly connected. It’s just a bunch of, disconnected, unrelated road segments. So about continuous roads, yea it’s quite easy to make those road segments continuous, sure but almost impossible to create a connect all those segments, create a graph and smooth all together. OK, not impossible but not an easy task either so I’ll skip that for now.



As you can see, segments are continuous now but connections between segments still looks ugly. And yea it’s not smoothed either but it’ll be quite easy now that we have them in one piece.

3) Major refactoring. I really hate making big refactoring sessions like this but I really had to this time, mainly for layer things. Right now, building, water, road class are just keeping data. Removed all mesh generation code from those and moved them to factories. Admittedly it should have been like them from the beginning… my bad. But anyway, this new structure should be much better now. There is still some stuff to do there, but hopefully, won’t be this big.

4) Landuse layer! I almost forgot that but yea, we have a landuse/park layer now. Landuse layer has quite different stuff in there, bridges, parks, residential zones etc. I decided just to go with parks at the moment, as others made the general look messy. You can tweak it as you like, please let me know what about your work as well!

5) Also fixed some issues from Github Issues page. You can always post your reports/requests there as well. I’m actively using it!



Guess that’s it for now. Just run the sample and walk around Paris, you’ll see it’s soo much better than previous versions. I really hope you’ll like it as well.

Sooo what’s next? Not sure really, threading, visual improvements, more layers, custom objects, GPS, android build…. There is soo much to do and I’m quite sure I’m forgetting lots of other stuff. I’ll try to decide&post what’s next as soon as possible.

Please let me know what you think of this series, if you like it or not, if it’s useful for you, anything really.

Cheers,

Baran

Github Page

Download PokemonGO Clone Part 5: Layers



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