Topic: Elevation sources, terrain smoothness
Hi Alex, hope you are doing well. I have some questions again.
I want to use elevation for the drone gameplay in my game to look more realistic. I have been using Bing maps elevation and Horizon 2_Bing Maps, that works pretty well, but it is using a lot of API requests, thousands of them, so much that the 125.000 free requests/year will not last very long for one user, let alone several, even with caching. And having a lot of users roaming around the world would get very expensive if I paid for every request.
I know there is a way to intercept it with offline elevation data. Is there some free source for elevation data that could be downloaded and pre-loaded into the game? Lets say that a user lives in a specific area, he could then download the elevation data for only that area.
If not, do you think that Mapbox is a better alternative? I have tried using it but I'm having issues with smoothness of the terrain affecting the movement of the markers. Since the drone also is a marker it moves up and down depending on the terrain elevation, which is fine if it happens smoothly like with Bing elevation:
But with Mapbox it is not smooth at all: