Python to Google Sheets to Unity to JSON resource to runtime - nothing but net

I just uploaded a Unity app at http://bigdicegames.com/CWGSparks/index.html that draws this picture:

Which, if you've been following along, and are a little forgiving with my projection, could look like a highway map of the US. It's incomplete, and it's low res - the only vertices are at cities, and I have just shy of 500 cities in my database. Also, I've been manually connecting up cities based on my interest in them, so there's a lot more cities in Texas, Florida, and California, and a lot more highways that will someday be coming in to this picture.

Previous posts have talked about doing pathfinding from city to city, and I've been using Python for that part of the project. To help me visualise what's going on, I use Reportlab to draw PDFs, which sometimes I print out.

This is all intended to be in service of a game. (A computer game? Maybe playable on the web? I also have ideas of a choose-your-own-branching path gamebook, but that doesn't require as much pathfinding.) So, it makes sense to start porting the data into Unity.

In talking to my friends about this project, I talk about having a highway database. That's clearly putting on airs, as really what I have is two Python arrays of tuples. One array is the city array, and each line in the file has a city name and lat/lon coordinates. The other array is the road array, which links up cities by name. Simple as that.

Well, yeah, but a little gross. There's no error checking, and it's super easy to get duplicates in there. Greeley, Colorado was in my "database" twice, with two different spellings. That seems like it's cleaned up now.

Python's great, but it's not the best data repository. I've been kind of itching to move my data to a Google Sheets spreadsheet. This ties in with some desire I have to try to embrace a data-driven, "Entity/Component/System" (ECS) style for a personal project of some size.

Aside: http://bigdicegames.com/ECSteroids/index.html is a small game I made, trying to play around with ECS maybe a year and a half, two years ago. arrow keys steer, CTRL shoots.

So, anyway, I wanted to port my Python-based data to Google Sheets. That's super easy, I just wrote out a CSV file by hand for each of my tables. If I actually had to think about commas inside my data values, I'd probably go so far as to import csv from Python and use a writer provided. But no time for that.

So, I imported my CSV into a Google Sheets, um, sheet. Looks great, all my data is there, and even some fancier stuff, where I generate a unique key for city and roads, as if I was using a real database.

For what it's worth, a lot of those cities were scraped from Wikipedia's article on most populous cities in the US. So that got me started, but I've been adding extra cities to give my roads useful places to turn. The original Wikipedia article had 314 cities, and I've been adding extra places so that now the spreadsheet has 498 lines. Anchorage, Alaska and Honolulu, Hawaii are problematic, but I'll get to that later.

So, the data's in Google's hands now. Fine. I want to be able to use it inside Unity. I poked around a number of similar tools, and ended up using Google Sheets for Unity Lite, which does the job I need right now. There's a non-lite version on itch.io, but it's unclear to me what the value added is.

Watching and rewatching A YouTube video where a guy is using GSFUL to import data, I managed to pull the data out of Google Sheets, and down into JSON data in my app. Cool, so far.

Except I don't really want the users to be hammering Google Sheets to pull data at runtime. I'd much prefer to bundle that data into the app itself.

Unity has several ways to make this sort of thing work, but what I chose to do is that my Google Sheets pull happens as an editor extension, pulling the data as JSON, and then I write it into my Assets/Resources/JSON folder. "Resources" are data that get bundled up inside the app through Unity magic.

A little dead end banging around, trying to read from the Resources folder directly, I ended up using Resources.Load<TextAsset>, like so:

And the JSON is now in a CityArray and RoadArray object, each of which is a simple (if annoying) wrapper around the array of JSON objects for cities and roads. Boom.

At that point, I just used Vectrosity to draw the lines. There was a little bit of math to jam the map onto the screen rectangle, but that's just a bounding box and some scaling. Nothing fancy.

I sort of want to put some virtual cars on the roads driving from state to state. (No papers, Vasili!) That can come later.

Also, maybe a little more Texas, it looks lonely.