Creating Minecraft-inspired Worlds with the Mapbox Unity SDK

David Rhodes
Wed, 21 Dec 2016 16:00:00 -0500

Our Mapbox Unity SDK is all about bringing real world map data to the world of mobile games, AR, and VR. This doesn’t always mean near-reality representations like the SimCity scene we blogged about last week. Here’s an example where we used the SDK to create a Minecraft-inspired virtual world based on real world data.

We’re using our global digital elevation model to generate a topographically correct rendering of the world in blocks. Each block is textured according to real-world land use in Mapbox Streets.

These scenes were generated from land use and elevation data of Torres Del Paine and Crater Lake.

If you wanted to expand this, you could use points of interest data from Mapbox Streets to generate structures and towers, or you could procedurally spawn monsters in, say, parks and forests.

We give you full control of every map layer in Unity and we’re excited to see what you come up with. What would you build?

Sign up to receive the Mapbox Unity SDK Beta and show us what you’re building on Twitter by using the hashtag #BuiltWithMapbox.