Not sure but I just did a test in Honolulu, Hawaii at PHNL and noticed when I deactivated the osm north america from simheaven and use the default, that the buildings look a lot better (especially downtown Honolulu). I haven't tested anywhere else but can see a difference already. Has OSM data improved in the latest beta builds of X-Plane? If so, I guess I'll stick to the default? 

 

Anyone else notice this?

There is no OSM building data in default X-Plane. Only roads, railroads, etc. X-plane then adds custom buildings to these roads with an advanced algorithm.

 

Not sure if the data from simheaven that you downloaded contains OSM buildings, but I suspect it does. Unfortunately the actual look of the buildings is better in default X-Plane (better, more realistic textures), but the placement is not according to real world coordinates.

 

So usually you can get a pretty good looking town with default X-Plane, but the buildings won´t be in the same places as in the real world, Simheaven with OSM2Xplane data is the opposite. Buildings dont look so good, but are in the right spot.

 

Jan

NO scenery updates from Laminar over the last two years (or ever since the original scenery release). You might only have the  improved OSM data via my HD Mesh Scenery v2 which is based on much newer (dated around end of September 2013) data than the default global scenery. Visual differences can come also via changed / improved art assets (like changed autogen placement ... then building blocks might look different even with the same scenery data). But to my knowledge, no (or not much) such improvements were added during the 10.30 betas (but more so around 10.20-10.25).

The North America OSM data is sorely lacking compared to Europe. It's a hit or miss of not enough to too much, take Virginia for instance, hardly any building placement, but the entire city of Chicago is uploaded to a frame killing level.

 

 

The North America OSM data is sorely lacking compared to Europe. It's a hit or miss of not enough to too much, take Virginia for instance, hardly any building placement, but the entire city of Chicago is uploaded to a frame killing level.

 

This is very much the case in the US, UK and Australia. Very patchy data, but the small areas that are covered have often been done by a data import which contains so many buildings it kills FPS.

 

There's two things affecting quality in the US:

 

1) Availability and quality of data in OSM. Lots of cities in the US have free data available from other sources, e.g. Seattle. OSM2XP can read these files if you're brave, but the buildings will use the not-so-nice looking facade set. I'll add support into World2XPlane at some point for ShapeFiles in addition to OSM data (i.e. Used together).

 

2) Quality textures and regional models. Again, the OSM2XP facade set (Often just called OSM by people) is not particularly nice when you get up close. Give it time, and I'm sure more quality models and textures will appear and be used in future Simheaven updates. We now have a user who has created some Southern US state models, which will appear in the next OSM files on Simheaven, as World2XPlane now supports US state regions.

tonywob, very nice stuff coming for X-Plane. but what about OSM data for Asian region? Is only Europe the only region that has good OSM data and the rest of the world is lacking?

 

 

tonywob, very nice stuff coming for X-Plane. but what about OSM data for Asian region? Is only Europe the only region that has good OSM data and the rest of the world is lacking?

 

Asia is pretty much the same as the US. Japan has had an import of forest data, but mostly it's patchy. Europe suffers the same problems, Spain and the UK are quite poorly populated, and there isn't much mapping activity in either country, but if you watch the mapping activity in Germany, it's being updated literally every second and is very well populated. Mapping is a lot of work (easy work, just time consuming), but if enough people organise and work together it becomes manageable

Asia is pretty much the same as the US. Japan has had an import of forest data, but mostly it's patchy.

Japan had more than just forests added ... effectively they add all free vector data like roads, railroads, water features and forests to OSM ... The only thing missing (and I couldn't find such data either) for japan are mostly the buildings.