Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[zzz]

I was thinking, if you had building models that were practically just cuboids with windows textured onto them and took up no more resources than the tree models, you could use pics of the Earth at night to create cities.

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/NPP/news/earth-at-night.html



If the brightness value of the pixel was used to dictate the density of the building models you could dynamically create population areas all over Outerra. It wouldn't be perfect and you'd have things like lines of buildings where a highway has lit up the source pic but it'd help create a more living world.

[John514]

Outerra will use OpenStreetMap data to crate and place buildings.
It is much more acurate than using lightmaps.

[Timmo]

You could....but there is far better data which denotes polygons of urban areas (in more poorly mapped ares) even down to individual buildings (in better mapped areas) such as Open Street Map (OSM).
The use of 'population density' rasters is useful though- In Microsoft Flightsim X/Lockheed Martin Prepar3D, a relatively coarse raster (~1.2km GSD equivalent) is used to control the density of cars on the roads, boats on the water, height distribution of buildings etc. Higher values (I think it's an 8 bit/0-255 raster) indicate greater population density, lower values indicate lower population density)