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[corona]

A while ago I read in some threads that you are working on an openstreetmaps importer.

I just looked a bit at the xml that is generated from there, and its quite amazing. In addition to streets (with type descriptions), you get rivers, forests, trains, bus stops, schools, sports facilities (with type), supermarkets, and probably tons more. I mean, I am truly amazed. Come to think of it, it can probably be the soul source for landclass data too.

Is there any movement from you in that area regarding an importer? I know you only have roads available right now, but just think how much more awesome the demo would be if a small area came with proper road layout. I think it would also be a good test for your engine just to see how it handles a large amount of roads and the necessary terrain adjustments in a hilly environment.

I can't wait to see what you make of it (a little teaser maybe? hehe). The potential of this seems extraordinary.

Edit: Oh, and runway and taxiway layout information is also available :-)

[cameni]

Yes the potential is high, especially considering that Outerra needs vector data to generate the detail, unlike the classic engines using raster imagery extensively.

However it won't be without problems. Connecting the various road types properly at junctions, insufficient attributes (generating the right look in 3D needs more attributes than generating a map), or just determining where the various entities come into the pipeline ..

We want to support rivers and railroads first, and to add a wider support for roads and pavements and their blending together, as there are still some problems with that.

[corona]

I'm sure its not easy, but the potential is enourmous. I don't even need a game anymore, this could be Google Earth 3d....err, I mean Outerra Earth :-)

For roads, well I think you should just go by hierarchy, and when they meet have the lower one of the two disconnected.

Please just make sure that you do this generically, so its quite easy for useres (modders) to add support for different types.

So say i can just add a definition of how "Power" tags should be handled, the user should simple by able to point at a, let's call it VectorLayout definition file.  Which then could point at a 3d model (for poles) and define that this should be placed every...50m..., and connection with a 3d model of the power lines themselves.

Similarly, if someone wants to add support for "amenity-fuel", the definition file could just point to a ground texture, a few 3dmodels (of which the engine will choose the biggest that fits into the area or something like that).

The definition should also specify different types based on a hierarchy of locations, so let's say continent-country-state-city, so more specialist, eg. Fuel station can appear.

My Point is, think User Generated content. You don't have to support all this stuff, users will. The Flightsim community especially, once interested, will jump onto this. Hell, the openstreetmaps stuff makes it easy to have their corner appear properly.

I'm so excited by this possibility right now.

[MatthewS]

We want to support rivers and railroads first

I've been working on a OSM importer for FSX.... one problem I've encountered with the coastline data is that sometimes it be very straight edged because it just lacks sufficient data points in the "ways" that define the coastline (and even rivers/inland water).

Look at this map of Bangkok, the river is very detailed but the coastline of the Gulf of Thailand lacks detail.
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=13.5952&lon=100.6212&zoom=12&layers=M

With Outerra I guess you have the tech to fill in missing data points using fractals to generate more naturalistic looking coastlines.

Of course the problem then is knowing what sections to actually interpolate because in city areas it might be correct to have straight edged coastlines due to docks and other man made features.

[corona]

First....it's kinda freaky that out of all the cities in the world you just happen to mention Bangkok. What are the chances (I'm there these days).

Second, well the coastline data doesn't seem to bad compared to let's say google maps. But I only had a quick look.

At the end of the day though, this data will only get better over time, and the beauty of it all is, anybody can improve it. So if you are concerned about the coastline appearance, you can edit it right now. From the web. Without any scenery editor specifically made for any specific flightsim. And, people not even interested in flightsim, will improve the data all over the world.

I looked into it some more, and people are even tagging specific brands of stores/gas stations/etc. I am truely coming to think it would be really foolish not to make use of it.

For historic data, or fantasy worlds, you can use the same layout, just with different datasets that people create. Editors already exists, so you don't need to write editors for Scenery even.

[MatthewS]

well the coastline data doesn't seem to bad compared to let's say google maps. But I only had a quick look.

Yes OSM is a great resource for sure!   If you zoom in on the river you will see its very detailed compared to the coastline to the south....  In FSX the transition from the detailed river to the "blocky" coast is quite apparent but as you say its just a matter of someone adding better data to OSM.

[Chris M]

Any news about the OSM data? Are you still following that path or have you abandoned it?

[cameni]

We didn't take on it yet, first we need to finish the basic road primitives, including joins and crossroads. Maybe we'll just open the API and leave the import on someone else who can play with OSM data and getting them inside Outerra.

[corona]

I still believe that while you have an awesome natural environment simulator, ultimately you will need to shift your focus more into areas shaped by humans, wether that be full on cities or for starters a road grid in order to realize almost all types of games.

I do realize there a huge difficulties to overcome in this field, including some that you have mentioned (but also efficient rendering and the like), but the basic dataset would be available for fairly accurate results, and (I think), you get all that for free.

I did not intend to start the third and fourth setence with "I", but I'm too lazy to restructure the sentences, so bear with me.

I do not think leaving something, as is my believe, vital as an importer for raw data to third parties to be a wise course of action. Allow them to write better ones, sure, but I think you will need to get data in somehow yourself anyways, so you'll need some sort of importer.

Of course you know much more about both your strategic plans as well as the engine than any of us, I just ramble out my thoughts ;-)

[cameni]

Well, we would outsource it in some way in any case. I mean the task of parsing OSM data, indexing using our projection scheme and feeding it to the engine. And then the process of checking everything will have probably to be crowdsourced, possibly with a way to get the corrections into OSM first, to keep the import path clean.

What amount of strategic control we should keep there .. that's question.

[Lewin]

OpenStreetMap and other similar GIS systems do not contain information to build unique buildings in the game, they at best only indicate the height and number of storeys buildings.
Need an extended (game) version of vector map and the ability to import data from the same OpenStreetMap and an additional opportunity to put the  on the vector map id ID required building.
This id must be connected to the internal base of 3d models of buildings within Outerra, it is desirable to give users the ability to supplement this base their 3d models of buildings.
So users will fill the world in Outerra, realistic urban or not)

P.S Sorry for bad English, but I hope you get the idea.

[Cid250]

I post here a tool for procedural citys:

http://www.gamr7.com/init/urban_pad

Will be possible to include support for an existant external product (this or any other), or has Outerra  dev team a roadmap for including his own procedural building generation and edition?.

I think that will be nice to add support for some external libraries like speedtree, since it seems the "standard" for forest procedural generation in the video game engines today.

[cameni]

Some products could be used, but most of them would perform better if they were incorporated directly into the engine, utilizing the new architecture.
For example, output from the procedural city tool is a complete city model, that has to be loaded progressively and rendered cleverly to get a good performance. It would be more effective to generate the city on demand in the engine from a set of procedural rules.

Speedtree is a typical case of this - in no way we could render that many trees as is required for the visibility using Speedtree. What is good for environments with a limited visibility (typical games), without seamless transitions down to the simplest level of detail, wouldn't work for Outerra.

[Cid250]

World War 2 Online has a range of view of more than 8Km in their landscapes with speedtree. At the longest ranges, speedtree just render a 2D tree, while at close range, the 3D detail is impresive. They (WWII Online codders) balanced very good the levels of details of each tree at diferent ranges, so it's just a matter of tunning.

You can see a forest of several squared kilometers with speedtree when you fly over in your airplane, but as infantry fighting in a big forest, you see the trees with all the maximun detail of speedtree, and you can use the trunks as fire cover.

SpeedTree suport will be a nice feature if Outerra does it well.

But for procedural cities, the thing is more complex, because it seems that there are several products of several enterprises, and none of them is still a "standard" in the video game industry. Which is better?

CityEngine: http://www.procedural.com/
City Generator (Introversion): http://forums.introversion.co.uk/introversion/viewtopic.php?t=586
Urban Pad: http://www.gamr7.com/init/urban_pad
CityGen: http://www.citygen.net/
Etc...

[cameni]

To put it into a perspective, 8km is where the red line is.


Billboard trees switch to a canopy overlay earlier than that, but there's still like 300k trees.
I've seen some videos of WW2, while the trees alone can do for that type of game, the ugliest thing is how Speedtree trees switch the level of detail.

We are working on our tree generator that provides much smoother detail transition and allows for higher amount of our trees to be rendered. But if a licensee insists on using SpeedTree, we won't be blocking him ...