Re:ArcGIS Maps SDK brings geospatial data to Unity and Unrea...
by geo-matik on Tuesday August 02, 2022 @04:19AM
(#32316282)
Indeed, the ArcGIS Maps SDK is about GIS content first and foremost, not CAD content that almost always lacks geolocation. It's a bit disappointing from HN that the top comment, while containing valid information, is only remotely applicable to the tool at hand.
Re:ArcGIS Maps SDK brings geospatial data to Unity and Unrea...
by solardev on Tuesday August 02, 2022 @05:44AM
(#32316771)
I hear ya, but I also think it's so cool that these tools are finally intersecting! GIS has come a long way in the last decade or so, along with drone photogrammetry, while UE and Unity continued to mature alongside GPUs. We're finally at a point where this sort of thing is not just conceivable, but even doable on a typical mid to high end gaming computer at home, using largely open tools (like QGIS, public GIS data from the city/county/state/federal agencies, the open drone photogrammetry toolkit whose name escapes me at the moment) alongside home/indie pricing for the big commercial tools (UE, Unity, Arc, ESRI APIs).
We're finally at a place where that convergence is happening. As someone who grew up a gamer, went into the natural sciences, then web dev, it used to be hard to find overlaps in these fields. Then gradually the professionals in each started realizing their shared need for geospatial data, QGIS really took off, Leaflet and Openlayers got really good, WebGL matured... Anyway blah blah blah it's a perfect storm of many technologies finally getting cheap and easy enough to use.
I can't wait to see what people make.
But they are moving into 3D, such as using drone photogrammetry to map cities at once: https://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/2.8/help/mapping/layer-pro...
Sometimes those 3D layers are built from simple extruded polygons, other times they are more detailed meshes. But AFAIK even the most complex don't typically approach CAD complexity. More like the 3D buildings you see in Google Street View or the old Microsoft Flight Simulator.
Any GPU capable of running an Unreal Engine game should be able to handle that sort of stuff.
But it's really cool to see them going this way. It's always been a dream to play a AAA game in a real-world city (kinda like Watch Dogs or GTA) but where you can import any city you want.
You can already kinda do this with terrain with Cesium for Unreal (https://cesium.com/platform/cesium-for-unreal/) or for other games like Cities Skylines (https://en.number13.de/cities-skylines-how-to-import-heightm...), but I think those typically are limited to basic heightmaps.
Being able to translate not just buildings, but hydrology, vegetation, population density, etc. all from public GIS data, and simulate a whole game from them...? That'd be really awesome.