What’s new in ArcGIS Maps SDKs for Game Engines

MichaelBranscomb · ‎02-10-2024

The latest release of the ArcGIS Maps SDK for Unity and ArcGIS Maps SDK for Unreal Engine includes game-changing capabilities that are the culmination of a series of major development epics spanning multiple releases over the last year. In this blog post we'll review some of the highlights and look at how they can be applied in your work building serious games and industrial digital twins at the intersection of cutting edge GIS and game engine development.

Building scene layers

The Game Engine Maps SDKs now enable you to build your next generation 3D and XR apps including the ability to visualize, query, and filter BIM (building information model) data through the new, comprehensive support for building scene layers.

Building scene layer representing the Turanga Library in Christchurch, New Zealand (building data provided by Christchurch City Council).

Building scene layers enable you to visualize highly detailed, complex 3D models of buildings and interact with the individual components that make up the fabric of the building by querying and filtering different criteria. For example, your users might want to filter the entire building by the building level and show just the content for a single specific floor, or they might want to view all the aspects that belong to a single building subsystem, such as the pipes. You can build all this and more with the rich support for building scene layers.

Custom filter expression for a building scene layer (building data provided by Christchurch City Council).

Mesh modifications and spatial filters

To truly integrate GIS content within a game engine, you need the ability to manipulate that content from within the game engine by slicing, dicing, and splicing with your own data. One of the most common feature requests we heard from you was the need to create an empty space in the scene for your content, whether other ArcGIS layers or game engine assets. The latest release of the Game Engine Maps SDKs provides genuinely groundbreaking support for modifying a terrain mesh and filtering 3D scene layers. The areas you specify will exclude (clip) or include data (mask) meshes and scene layers, plus you can also flatten the mesh to a constant value (replace). Once you've applied mesh modifications and/or spatial filters you can start adding your own terrain model that might represent a new landscape for a planned building, supplement a 3D object scene layer with a building scene layer for a specific structure, or include game engine assets to represent other real-world objects.

With no established paradigm for polygon digitization in the game engines, the UX design presented an interesting challenge that required finding a new workflow, natural for both game engine developers and designers, and GIS developers. The result is a powerful, intuitive set of tools integrated with the game engine IDEs to support interactively creating, modifying, and moving polygons that define your area or areas of interest.

Clip, mask, & replace mesh modifications.

Low-code/no-code development

We know many of you aren't [yet] experienced game engine developers, yet you understand the value and benefit of building these next generation 3D and XR apps. And perhaps you're promoting these new capabilities within your organization, or to your customers, to help justify a new project or product. In cases like these, you need tools to help you get started quickly. The SDKs include a comprehensive set of low-code/no-code tools within Unity and Unreal Engine for interactively managing your terrain and layers, for modifying and filtering meshes and scene layers, and for querying building scene layers. For the more experienced game engine developers amongst you, the SDK includes a full API to support building all these workflows and more, in code.

Comprehensive geospatial SDKs for game engines

Over the last year we have also added significant new chapters and topics to our developer guide docs and completely redesigned and enhanced our interactive code samples with a game-centric design approach, plus new XR samples for virtual tabletops and VR.

With the latest release in December 2023, for the first time, we simultaneously released the Unity Maps SDK in the Unity Asset Store and as a download from the ArcGIS Developers site. And as you read this, we're busy working behind the scenes to ensure we can bring future releases of our Unreal Engine Maps SDK to you via the Unreal Engine Marketplace, while you can of course still get the latest today from the ArcGIS Developers site.

What's next?

Each release of the ArcGIS Maps SDKs Game Engines continues our dual-purpose mission to bring accurate real-world geospatial data to Unity and Unreal Engine, and to integrate GIS capabilities seamlessly with your game engine app development. Looking ahead through 2024 we have many great epics, stories, and ~~cool~~ valuable features on the roadmap: we look forward to sharing more information about these with you at the upcoming Esri Developer Summit! Why not register for the Dev Summit today and be amongst the first to learn about the latest new developments in Maps SDKs for Game Engines? There are in-person and virtual attendance registration options available, find out more on the Esri Developer Summit registration website.

Resources

Unity

Unreal Engine