This is a plee for anyone using OSM scenery inside X-Plane. Please spend some time updating your local area (if it hasn't been mapped), by adding some forests and buildings. It's really easy to do, and it not only will it look good inside X-Plane in future scenery packs, but will also help expand the maps for OSM. Additionally, it will also probably appear in products for FSX as well.

 

I normally spend about 30 mins a day updating my local area, and I've tried converting it into X-Plane and the effect it gives is very much worth it. It's an easy way to author scenery and share it with others :-)

I'll have to start doing it, but, just as Jeroen v E posted the other day at the FSX forum, "I hate forums" because they're addictive :-)

Indeed :-). In a strange sort of way, I actually find it quite relaxing :-)

I started updating maps in Scandinavia, but osm2xp seems to treat every house the same. Regardless of labeling or tags. So as it is now I think it works best in central and southern Europe where the houses that OSM gives looks more correct/realistic. 

 

Not really a reason for NOT updating other areas of course, it's just shifted my focus down south  B)

 

Thank you Tony and everyone else who is adding to the OSM maps! I'll try to contribute more myself.

I tried experimenting with the tags for buildings to see which is best, generally for houses i use

 

building=house

building:levels= (how many floors)

 

or for terraces

 

building=terrace

building:levels = (how many floors)

 

You are right though, it doesn't seem to differentiate between the different building types. It does respect the height and levels parameter though, so at least the buildings are the correct height.

 

I also did some experimentation with the OSM2XP in regards to buildings like churches, windmills etc. These aren't bought across by default, but it's easy enough to create a mapping for them. They won't be perfectly aligned to the scenery underneath, but at least a church looks like a church, and it looks quite nice sat in the middle of a village :-)

And if you are at it already .... always think about water features (rivers, lakes, coastline) and roads too!

@alpilotx Originally I just did buildings and woodlands, but now do everything, including adding missing roads, rivers, labeling schools and shops etc. It's quite addictive, and also I hope useful for others as well

Would love to, and I started doing it for my own city, but gave up. Far too many detached family houses, even in my local community. Drawing them one-by-one or even copy-pasting them brought my carpal tunnel symptoms back with a vengeance.

 

XPlane should have a way to incorporate quick-and-dirty zoning data submitted by users, and auto-generate plausible buildings for them (SimCity fashion), as a stop-gap for areas with horribly incomplete OSM data.

 

 

Drawing them one-by-one or even copy-pasting them brought my carpal tunnel symptoms back with a vengeance.

 

You can use JOSM along with the terrace plugin and the buildings plugin. It makes adding terraces incredibly easy, you simply use the building plugin to draw a box around the entire group of houses, and then use the terrace tool to divide up the square into the required number of houses, the whole sequence takes just a few seconds, and beats the hell out of using Potlatch and copy & paste :-).

XPlane should have a way to incorporate quick-and-dirty zoning data submitted by users, and auto-generate plausible buildings for them (SimCity fashion), as a stop-gap for areas with horribly incomplete OSM data.

Thats EXACTLY how X-Plane 10 Default Scenery (or equally, my HD Mesh Scenery) is done! The default scenery does not use the OSM buildings (nor OSM forests) but does city autogen based on landclass data (landclass data is kind of a zoning data, which gives a more or less accurate classification of a given small patch of land - usually taken from different government sources). The OSM buildings and forests are important for all the scenery projects based on OSM2XP (like for example you can find at http://simheaven.com/)

 

You can read more information about the data sources used in the default sceney (and how they are used) here (an old interview I did with xsimreviews when XP10 was new): http://xsimreviews.com/2011/12/10/developer-interview-andras-fabian-mr-x-terrain/

 

 

Thats EXACTLY how X-Plane 10 Default Scenery (or equally, my HD Mesh Scenery) is done! The default scenery does not use the OSM buildings (nor OSM forests) but does city autogen based on landclass data (landclass data is kind of a zoning data, which gives a more or less accurate classification of a given small patch of land - usually taken from different government sources). The OSM buildings and forests are important for all the scenery projects based on OSM2XP (like for example you can find at http://simheaven.com/)

 

I'm presuming the scenery generator for X-Plane takes into account the landuse=residential/industrial areas for landclass?. I've been adding these also where possible, adding to the background behind towns/villages etc.

I'm presuming the scenery generator for X-Plane takes into account the landuse=residential/industrial areas for landclass?. I've been adding these also where possible, adding to the background behind towns/villages etc.

Yes, of course ... and it also works with urban densities (either real data, or in some places synthetically derived density data). BUT NO, all this landclass data is NOT taken from OSM (because landclass data in OSM is extremely varying in quality, and in many places not available - whereas the X-Plane scenery generator needs full landclass coverage to work well) but - as  I told - from 3rd party - usually - government sources.

Thats EXACTLY how X-Plane 10 Default Scenery (or equally, my HD Mesh Scenery) is done! The default scenery does not use the OSM buildings (nor OSM forests) but does city autogen based on landclass data (landclass data is kind of a zoning data, which gives a more or less accurate classification of a given small patch of land - usually taken from different government sources). The OSM buildings and forests are important for all the scenery projects based on OSM2XP (like for example you can find at http://simheaven.com/)

 

(bolded for emphasis)

 

 

But this is what I meant when I said there didn't seem to be a way to use *user*-submitted zoning/landclass data.

 

For my city (Ottawa, Canada) I have no idea what government-provided data was used for the original XP10 auto-gen, but it clearly didn't include housing in the suburbs that's been there over 40 years, because it's just empty fields and forest around a road network right now.

 

OSM for my city shows there are enough areas in the suburbs designated residential, according to the OSM map key (unfortunately seems to be no way to designate light, medium or heavy). When the scenery is re-cut would it incorporate this landclass data from OSM or not? If yes, I'll add missing landclass data into OSM right away, if not I won't bother.

Do you read what I write?

 

I said: NO, we do NOT use OSM landclass data, because its quality is extremely varying and thus not a reliable source for scenery generation on the global level. So, even if our sources are not 100% perfect (and they are - for sure - not even 90% perfect), they are still - on a global / general scale!!! - much better than what OSM would deliver on its own. The only option would be to do some kind of mixing ... but believe me (I work with tons of geodata since years) even this approach has quite a lot of pitfalls (and could even make things worse in some places).

 

The problem with Canada is, that until now I could only rely on the not so perfect, global dataset called GlobCOVER. Its not bad in general, but neither is it perfect in many areas .... and it - sadly - tends to have quite a few "errors" when it comes to urban areas. So, here, the real solution would be to use some different data for Canada .... but until now, I have not found a good solution / replacement (which is really usable). Its also a quite complex process to incorporate new datasets in the process ...

Hmmmm, so, should we stick with default autogen / mesh, and wait for internal engine to get better sources and do a better job in terms of diversity ( house types at least... )?