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!

[theolagendijk]

@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.

@brnkhy I've been eagerly waiting for the "end of the year" (2024) update of the MapBox for Unity project. Is the publication of this (beta) update near? I would love to keep using the MapBox SDK in Unity projects.

[brnkhy]

@theolagendijk @Nyphur @astojilj @lucasgray

I just pushed out recent work to public repo here under this branch;
https://github.com/mapbox/mapbox-unity-sdk/tree/sdk3

this version is a complete overhaul, it replaces the old sdk and is structured as an UPM package. so you pull this branch, open a unity project and import package.json file using package manager. I'll try to provide more on installation and usage later today.

new version is much more minimalistic, doesn't have anything AR or bunch of mapbox apis like navigation but it should be more performance, work with latest ios/android, easier to develop etc.
I must say it's heavily WIP, you can already see another branch there for making vector filters better/easier so expect changes.
after bunch of feedbacks, hopefully we'll do a proper announcement for everyone and then we'll have much more open and clear communication on the development process.

let's call this a soft launch, I'll wait for first few feedbacks before doing a bigger announcement for v3.0.

thanks for everything guys, I hope this works well for you and helps your projects 🙇‍♂️

[brnkhy]

a short quick-start guide for v3.0 Alpha;
https://github.com/mapbox/mapbox-unity-sdk/blob/sdk3/README.md

[theolagendijk]

@brnkhy Thank you for the access to the alpha. I got the Examples running beautifully. Great performance indeed! Huge improvement.
Including the MapBox SDK v3.0 as a Unity package (into an empty Unity 6 project) did not work as I expected. A lot was correctly imported but the Example LocationBasedGame was imported as an empty folder. And WorldMapViewer was not imported at all.
This was easily solved by dragging those two examples to the Unity Editor project view ( Packages > Mapbox Unity SDK > Runtime > Mapbox > Example ).

[brnkhy]

@theolagendijk thank you very much for the feedback! I'm happy to hear it (mostly) worked well.
It's a strange bug about the import process but I'll keep an eye for it. I probably need to test with more and different unity editor versions, I never ran into that so far.

[lucasgray]

@brnkhy thank you so much for your work here.

I made two fresh projects, one using the Mobile 3d template, one using the Universal 3d template. Should I be using built in?

The editor worked just fine, and I was able to experiment with using my own mapbox studio theme, change coordinates, etc.

However I hit this snag when using Build and Run... to send to my phone -

* What went wrong:
Execution failed for task ':launcher:mergeReleaseNativeLibs'.
> A failure occurred while executing com.android.build.gradle.internal.tasks.MergeNativeLibsTask$MergeNativeLibsTaskWorkAction
   > 2 files found with path 'lib/arm64-v8a/libc++_shared.so' from inputs:
      - /Users/lucas-play/Runstrike Without Mobile Template/Library/Bee/Android/Prj/IL2CPP/Gradle/unityLibrary/build/intermediates/library_jni/release/copyReleaseJniLibsProjectOnly/jni/arm64-v8a/libc++_shared.so
      - /Users/lucas-play/.gradle/caches/transforms-3/e3afce06a9df19ac0a5121b6c2a25f07/transformed/jetified-common-24.0.0-beta.7/jni/arm64-v8a/libc++_shared.so
     If you are using jniLibs and CMake IMPORTED targets, see
     https://developer.android.com/r/tools/jniLibs-vs-imported-targets

* Try:

Any ideas? I can share more of the stacktrace if necessary.

I goofed with trying to add

  packagingOptions {
    pickFirst 'lib/armeabi-v7a/libc++_shared.so'
    pickFirst 'lib/arm64-v8a/libc++_shared.so'
    pickFirst 'lib/x86/libc++_shared.so'
    pickFirst 'lib/x86_64/libc++_shared.so'
  }

inside the plugin Runtime/Plugins/Android but I wasn't successful

[brnkhy]

@lucasgray I think this is the same issue; #1932
can you please post a few lines (about you also having the issue) there as well so we can keep track of it easier 🙏

[theolagendijk]

@brnkhy Thanks again for the MapBox SDK 3.0 alpha.
I’ve made good progress integrating the MapBox SDK 3 into an existing app. I can now display the map, pan, and zoom, and I’ve tested various custom styles, drawn route lines and Points of Interest, and visualized the user’s position on the map. Everything works as I expected. ( So I can confirm that MapBox SDK for Unity is very much alive. Screencapture from my app here. )

However, I’ve noticed an issue where some map tiles show more detail than others in custom styles. You can see this clearly in these two example screenshots:

Top tile more detail
Bottom tile more detail

Shifting the map slightly reveals more detail in one tile than in another. I’m not sure how to resolve this. I’ve tried switching from a perspective camera to an orthographic camera (thinking the distance to the tile might be the issue), but that didn’t help. Do you have any ideas or suggestions?

[brnkhy]

@theolagendijk very happy to hear it went well! Loved the video a lot, it's really cool to see what people are building; made me very happy!
If I understand it correct, you are using top down view with imagery on flat map. and I believe that issue you are having is happening because of the map area subdivision into quadtree, to optimize things especially when camera is looking towards horizon.
if your app/map is strictly top down, I think you can disable that altogether (it'll be better performance in your case as well).
It might be little tricky to set this up but try this;

• add a new gameobject to scene and add a FixedAreaTileProviderBehaviour script.
• select your map object and assign this new script to TileProvider field
  additional steps;
• I think FixedAreaTileProviderBehaviour will only create tiles in origin so very soon you'll move into empty space with no tiles
• Then you'll switch it with TransformBasedTileProviderBehaviour which generates tiles around an object, but now you'll need an object where your camera hits y=0 plane.

[theolagendijk]

@brnkhy Thanks for your quick reply!
You're right I was only using a topdown view on a flat map. My map augmentations are all 2D. So that seemed natural.
I gave your advice a try but due to the complexity of that direction decided to go for a slightly pitched camera for now. 70 degrees works great for my purposes and actually looks nicer than I had expected.
The different map tile detail levels appear a lot more natural / logical now.

Under the motto “dare to ask”, could you extend the "WorldMapViewer" example with example code showing how to implement a two-finger pinch gesture for zooming in and out, and a two-finger drag gesture to adjust the camera rotation on a touchscreen? I think those are features that many developers would want to use.

[brnkhy]

@theolagendijk I really like how this looks, can you share a little more on it though; was this a project using old sdk and you updated it to v3 now?

about camera scripts, we generally leave those to the developers because every app will need something slightly different and it's difficult to draw the line. next it'll be camera having inertia for example, then something else.
one problem here though, camera controls might not be easy to work with for developers. let's say, ok you want to do the touch controls but does the map api allow a good implementation. because I remember it was tricky to update map values in a specific order and with correct values etc etc. 🤔
I guess I might need to look into that but no promises for any time soon.

[theolagendijk]

@brnkhy Correct. The app was originally build around MapBox SDK 2. The app is build with Unity because at a couple of Points of Interest I'm using Unity's AR Foundation for Augmented Reality experiences. For example;
Street Art coming to life. 2D tracking of the painting.
Virtually placing part of historical building where it used to stand. 3D tracking.

I'm attempting to reimplement all the current app's (map related) functionalities with MapBox SDK 3. That seems to work! I'm almost done.

O and don't worry about the camera scripts. I've got that working for my purposes now. My implmentation feels a bit hacky. I might share my code if/when I clean it up a bit.