The Master Plan

[matteblair]

Part 0: Data types and utilities

• LngLat
• MercatorMeters
• TileAddress
• TileData
• Coordinate transforms

Part 1: Data sources

• Asynchronous file/http requests
• Vector tile format parser(s)

Part 2: Vector data mesh generation

• Polygon tesselation
• Polygon extrusion
• Polyline tesselation
• Point quads

Part 3: Feature filtering

• Feature property matching
• Filter composition
• Script filters

Part 4: Automatic tile coverage

• Fixed coverage based on input bounds
• Streaming coverage following a moving viewport

Part 5: Terrain data mesh generation

• Elevation grid mesh with normal maps
• Extruded polygon offsets by elevation grid
• Polygon and polyline subdivision by elevation grid

Future Parts:

• Custom location providers
• Geocoding queries
• Reverse geocoding queries
• Routing queries
• ???

[tallytalwar]

This looks like a solid plan and flow of work. Following are few ideas, opinions and maybe future work, I can think of right now, we can add to the list:

• Generic projection: Again could be part of the future (probably more useful in game design scenarios). We never added more map projection support in ES though.
• More on tile coverage: Borrowing proxy tiles and overzoomed tiles concept from tangram
• places APIs?
• isochrones support? (again maybe for future)

[matteblair]

Yeah, thinking about projection options is a good idea. In particular I'd like to think about a non-projection, where map features are drawn on a globe in their true 3D positions.

Some things I forgot on the list:

• Developer workflows: This is less of a coding task and more of a thought process for determining how to make it easy for game devs to use the output of our code (e.g. exporting models to an editable format)
• Deployment: We'll need to think about whether this belongs in the Unity Asset store and how we would get it there.
• Dot Net Core: Throughout development we should make a conscious effort to keep Unity-specific code as contained as possible, in order to enable later deployment to other Dot Net platforms.