How to use the asset in your project

Open your project in Unity Editor and select from the top menu GameObject / 3D Object / World Political Map Globe Edition option. You can also drag the prefab “WorldMapGlobe” from “Resources/Prefabs” folder to your scene. A WorldMapGlobe Game Object will appear in the hierarchy of your scene. Select it to show custom properties:

• Skybox: “User Defined” will respect your current scene setting. Any other setting will load the skybox provided with the asset. Basic skybox uses a 1024×1024 texture while the Tycho skybox uses 6 textures of 2K resolution of the Milky Way.

• Sun GameObject: allows you to specify which directional light will be used as the Sun.

• Sun Position: if no Sun game object is set, you can enter the position of the Sun in the scene here. Earth lighting will take into account the light direction.

• Show Moon: shows/hide the Moon. Optionally set “Auto Scale” to true, so both the distance and scale of the moon game object will be computed according to current Earth size.

• Show Earth: shows/hide the Earth. You can for example hide the Earth and show only frontiers giving a look of futuristic UI.

• Earth Style: changes current texture applied on the Sphere of the prefab.

• Show Latitude/Longitude Lines: will activate/deactivate the layers of the grid. The stepping options allow you to specify the separation in degrees between lines (for longitude is the number of lines).

• Lines Color: modifies the color of the material of the grid (latitude and longitude lines).

• Mode: overlay or masked, which will draw the grid only over oceans (note that masking the grid will incur in a performance hit – test it).

See Hexagonal Grid Section

• Show Cities: activate/deactivate the layer of cities.

• Min Population and other city filters: allows you to filter the cities to be drawn by either minimum population (metropolitan population) or its class (can force to always show region or country capitals).

• Min Population (K): allows to filter cities from current catalog based on population (K = in thousands). When you move the slider to the right/left you will see the number of cities drawn below. Setting this to 0 (zero) will make all cities in the catalog visible.

• Combine Meshes: combines all cities meshes into a single mesh improving performance. Note that once combined the dynamic city scaler no longer work, the city icons will retain its current scale.

• Frontiers Detail: specify the frontiers data bank in use. Low detail is the default and it’s suitable for most cases (it contains definitions for frontiers at 110.000.000:1 scale). If you want to allow zoom to small regions, you may want to change to High setting (30:000:000:1 scale). Note that choosing high detail can impact performance on low-end devices.

• Inland Frontiers: show/hide continent borders. This option computes which frontiers segments are shared by two or more countries showing only unique segments (take this into account if you modify frontiers).

• Show Countries: show/hide all country frontiers. It applies to all countries, however you can colorize individual countries using the API. If you enable this option, make sure “Inland Frontiers” is disabled to avoid redrawing continent borders.

• Frontiers Color: will change the color of the material used for all frontiers.

• Country Highlight Enabled: when activated, the countries will be highlighted when mouse hovers them. Current active country can be determined using countryHighlighted property.

• Country Highlight Color: fill color for the highlighted country. Color of the country will revert back to the colorized color if used.

• Draw Outline and Outline Color: draws a colored border around the colorized or highlighted country.

• Show Country Names: when enabled, country labels will be drawn and blended with the Earth map. This feature uses RenderTexture and has the following options:

• • Render Method: you can choose either render the labels on a texture that wraps around the globe (Blended) or individual text mesh objects in world space (World Space).

  • Texture Resolution: controls the size of the RenderTexture used when Render Method is set to Blended, thus affecting to the resolution of the labels shown in the map. Low quality uses a texture of 2048×1024, Medium 4096×2048 and High 8192×4096.

  • Relative Size: controls the amount of “fitness” for the labels. A high value will make labels grow to fill the country area.

  • Minimum Size: specifies the minimum size for all labels. This value should be let low, so smaller areas with many countries don’t overlap.

  • Labels and shadow color: they affect the Font material color and alpha value used for both labels and shadows. If you need to change individual label, you can get a reference to the TextMesh component of each label with Country.labelGameObject field.

• Show Provinces: when enabled, individual provinces/states will be highlighted when mouse hovers them. Current active province can be determined using provinceHighlighted property.

• Enable Enclaves: when enabled, provinces inside other provinces will be allowed.

• Show Cursor: will display a cross centered on mouse cursor. Current location of cursor can be obtained with cursorLocation property when mouseOver property is true.

• Always Visible: will not hide the cursor cross when pointer is outside the globe.

• Respect Other UI: will prevent any interaction with the globe if pointer is over other UI element.

• Allow User Rotation: whether the user can rotate the Earth with the mouse. You can implement your own interactions setting this to false and modifying the rotation / position fields of the gameObject transform.

• • Right Click Centers: it will center the selection on the globe when pressing right mouse button.

  • Constant Drag Speed: prevents acceleration when dragging/rotating/zooming the globe.

  • Keep Straight: will ensure the globe is always vertically oriented at any moment.

  • Constraint Position: limits rotation around a sphere position

• Drag On Screen Edges: performs an automatic drag when mouse is on the edges of screen.

• Allow User Zoom: wether the user can zoom in/out the Earth with the mouse wheel.

• Zoom Speed: multiplying factor to the zoom in/out caused by the mouse Wheel (Allow User Zoom must be set to true for this setting to have any effect).

• Distance Min / Max: minimum and maximum camera distance in World units.

• Camera: assign your main camera. The system will automatically pick any camera tagged as “MainCamera”.

• Autorotation Speed: makes the Earth rotate around its vertical axis automatically.

• Navigation Time: default duration when navigating to a target country/province/city or location.

• Navigation Mode: this option is very important. You must decide if you want the Earth to be rotated when navigating to a target location or make the Camera rotate around the Earth instead. If you plan to use the asset as part as the UI of your application/game, then the default behaviour (Earth rotates) may suit better since it won’t affect the main camera. Otherwise, choose “Camera rotates” which will make the camera fly around the Earth.

• Zoom: let you set the zoom (distance from camera to Earth) using a value between 0 (ground or minimum distance) to 1 (distance where the Earth can be seen entirely in the screen). Optionally you can push this value further.

• Enable Orbit: activates orbiting controls in which you can specify custom pitch/yaw angles.

• Precise Rotation: this option is designed to be used with tile system mode. It will switch Rotate Mode to Camera Rotates when zoom is beyond certain zoom level and switches it back to Earth Rotates when zoom level is reduced. This change prevents floating point issues by keeping the camera near the origin and only allow it to drag/rotate when it’s very near to the surface of the Earth, minimizing the distance travelled in world space.

• Follow Device GPS: if set to true, the map will always be centered on the coordinates returned by the device GPS.

• VR Enabled: forces VR compatibility in normal mode (when inverted mode is enabled, VR compatibility is always on).

• Main Camera: assign your main camera here (by default it uses Camera.main). Useful if you need to change cameras at runtime.

Choose Reset option from the gear icon to revert values to factory defaults.