radi wrote in Sun Apr 07, 2013 4:06 pm:The idea is: where OSM floorplans are available, use them. That includes quite a number of German cities, and some other European cities, as well. Where floorplans are missing, have an algorithm come up with something plausible. Plus, where OSM indicates, e.g., a gas station, insert a shared model. I thought I'd do this offline first, i.e. outside FG. Eventually I might want to do this in FG on the fly.
That does sound really promising, if you haven't already, you may want to read up on past discussions related to this, and get in touch with the corresponding people (such as Stuart) to further coordinate/streamline all related efforts here. For example, see these threads:
Subject: How to create better roads, highways, railroads?
martin wrote:miho wrote:is there a tutorial on how to use the OSM data for creating such scenery? Just to practise and be ready to go once the OSM guys have chenged their license...
Basically it's just replacing the respective VMap0 line data with OSM and probably choosing a different width for motorways/freeways, since OSM has one track for every direction.
Note also that OSM roads is not the cure for all our road data issues since OSM, even though they're having more detail than VMap0, their coverage is smaller (as recently mentioned on this forum), and therefore needs some helping hands in order to make a drop-in replacement for our VMap0 road coverage,
Martin.
Subject: Procedural buildings in OSM before part of Scenery
vanosten wrote:So the idea would be to procedurally generate buildings based on OSM data (not uploading to OSM!) based on other OSM data like streets, area classifications, ... I thought of enriching offline OSM data with buildings - which could then in a later step be used to actually generate buildings in Flightgear (or X-Plane with http://osm2xp.com/). Due to differences in landuse patters between e.g. cnetral Europe and USA the algorithm would naturally have to be configurable - however somewhere we need to start.
Subject: Procedural buildings in OSM before part of Scenery
stuart wrote:This is a really interesting idea. A couple of thoughts based on my experience writing the current random buildings code and general FG experience:
1) I think the right place for this information is in the scenery models database, or probably some similar off-shoot of that DB. We already have the OSM data in a PostGIS DB there, so you could retrieve data from that, do some complex off-line processing and then write the resulting data into our global database. In the end I created a small number of buildings and then use specialist GPU shader code to instantiate them multiple times. That will be much trickier for you to do, and will probably require some specific C++ code in FG to handle your buildings as a special case.
I'd be very happy for my random buildings to be supersede by proper procedural buildings, and would be happy to discuss the technicalities further.
Bottom line being, we have/had several related (or even competing) approaches here, and like Thorsten suggested earlier, it would make sense, to combine certain techniques to come up with a single unified method.
It would definitely seem like a good idea to get feedback from Stuart, psadro_gm and papillon81 - because they are heavily involved in the random buildings/TerraGear department, and they should be able to directly tell you, how to proceed from here - so that your work aligns well with related ongoing efforts.
Also, you may want to use the wiki to document your project, and maybe use it as a place for brainstormings related to combining the various techniques. BTW: You may also want to add an announcement about your project to the upcoming newsletter (see my signature).