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[HiFlyer]

Regarding the new towns/villages: I note that trees grow through an awful lot of houses, which somewhat spoils the realism. This is something I know I mentioned years ago, but I can't remember what the reply was, back then.

Are there any plans now to make it so that trees avoid growing through the centers of buildings?

[cameni]

We surely don't intend to leave it as is, though I actually didn't notice it that frequently, guess some locations may be worse.

There's also a different problem, there should be a lot more trees in cities among the buildings, but the roofs destroy the IR spectrum and we'll have to place them artificially. We'll have to make a finer resolution grid for placing trees there, right now it's 10x10m cell per tree and that won't be fine enough for these areas.

[2eyed]

How about a automatically generated front/back yard to each building (if appropriate)? Would look much more natural.
Btw: I see a lot buildings with flat roofs along countrysides whereas blockhouses would fit much better.

[cameni]

How about a automatically generated front/back yard to each building (if appropriate)? Would look much more natural.

Planned, but a bit harder to extract from available data.

Btw: I see a lot buildings with flat roofs along countrysides whereas blockhouses would fit much better.

That's totally WIP. I actually hacked our building importer to produce the village data (which weren't planned to be released originally) and restricting what buildings it used. Also there are many holes in OSM attributes that make it harder to deduce what building types should be used.

[2eyed]

How about a automatically generated front/back yard to each building (if appropriate)? Would look much more natural.

Planned, but a bit harder to extract from available data.

Btw: I see a lot buildings with flat roofs along countrysides whereas blockhouses would fit much better.

That's totally WIP. I actually hacked our building importer to produce the village data (which weren't planned to be released originally) and restricting what buildings it used. Also there are many holes in OSM attributes that make it harder to deduce what building types should be used.

The question is, how far the resemblance to the real world should go. I would prefer visually pleasing results with invented (imaginary) details over (partly unreliable) data.

[patmarrnc]

One of the things I like about Outerra is that it allows us to add things that aren't automatically generated.  Building a back yard is already totally possible, you just have to model what you want and import it.  Your world can be whatever you want it to be.

[JakeRS]

Not really the topic, but could FSX/X plane style "land class" maps work in Outerra? My city for example is surrounded by agricultural fields in real life and it would be awesome if there were landclasses that "filled up" parts of maps, but in Outerra there's almost nothing around my city, there are forests where I guess they're marked in Open street (or whatever the data source is), but once you reach agri-lands...nothing, like you're driving in deserts of Australia. This and maybe more biomes would bring realism to a whole new level.

[cameni]

The plan is to extract agricultural polygons from available sources like cropland data and seasonal imagery, and have the fields "alive", changing with seasons with different crops and phases.

[Jagerbomber]

 

[KelvinNZ]

Hi Cameni,

I'm back from a long break doing other life things. I notice a whole bunch of improvements in the terrain and OSM data. I have had a lot of experience working with vector data using global mapper, and creating shapefiles which get processed through an external application for Prepar3d / Flight Simulator X. It would be great to be able to have a tool to import vector data such as forests, roads, different other foliage, tracks, etc... based on local available data, at least for New Zealand we have a lot of vector data in GIS shaprefile WGS84 format.

Is there any chance of something within the application to enable import of vector data through shape files using the WGS84 coordinate system? I can explain more if you need.

Thanks
Kelvin

[Acetone]

Wow, Kelvin is here!

Welcome back

[cameni]

Is there any chance of something within the application to enable import of vector data through shape files using the WGS84 coordinate system? I can explain more if you need.

Hi Kelvin. There already exist some import interfaces for roads (+runways), rivers and buildings, but at the moment the only import plugin that exists is OSM importer.

It should be possible to write a shape file importer plugin for the types of features supported (polygon land class is coming), but there are some specifics that do not make it particularly easy. For example, shape files usually define only 2D shapes, and even if they did come with elevation info it may be out of sync with terrain in OT. Since we are not interested in just painting the ground with road color but are also blending vector paths and modifying the terrain, you have to define so-called tangent planes where roads join and intersections lie to have them connecting smoothly, after the importer resolves the heights for imported nodes.

Not sure what the P3D/FSX importer does, but I'd be interested to learn more about it in order to provide some helper functionality in future.

[HiFlyer]

You guys should really take a look at a program called scenproc: https://www.scenerydesign.org/scenproc/

Many flightsims use it to generate scenery from osm data.