Missing XP10 Water? Tell me where!

[greggerm]

Hiya,

 

After adding thousands of square miles of water to OpenStreetMaps in my local region and in other areas, I'd like to do more targeted work on getting water which may be missing in X-Plane 10 into the OSM database so that when and if the scenery is re-worked, water will be there.

 

If you know of a local lake, pond, or river of substance which is missing in the UNITED STATES in X-Plane 10, follow these steps:

 

STEP ONE: Visit www.openstreetmap.org and LOOK to see if the water you are missing is on the map - zoom in close to be sure. If it IS there, great! No work is needed, and if the scenery is recut, the water should show up. If it is NOT there, move on to step two.

 

(I will be very disappointed if you do not perform step one. Save us all the time and effort and make sure that the data is actually missing from the OSM map before making your request.)

 

STEP TWO: Post a message with the city/state of the water, and the general location of the missing water (eg: 2 miles southwest of town center). I'll do my best to get it worked into OSM, but keep in mind it does depend on how many requests I get and how complex the water bodies are.

 

I would like to avoid requests for your aunt's backyard fish pond or the stream at the end of the neighborhood street... if it's clearly visible from the air and clearly a loss to not have it in the sim, let me know!

 

-Greg

 

(PS : Posted to general discussion because while this work does lead to better scenery, it's not really a "scenery design" post/comment and I need as many "regular" users to see this as possible.)

[scubajuan_new]

I read somewhere, perhaps in this forum that there are two or maybe more ways to represent water bodies in OSM and that X-Planes global scenery designers only used one of them. That might be the cause of so many lakes, rivers and ponds are missing. I am currently working on an scenery of Acapulco Mexico, and planning to extend the scenery north to place some of the hotels, marinas and harbour in the bay, and also the small military airfield north of the Acapulco Bay. This airfield is also next to a lagoon. The main international airport sits next to a big lake and is pretty significant for visual approaches, specially to the rwy 24 which the final approach is all over the water until almost the threshold. It is too bad that the beech is not represented either and the terrain cuts to water (the ocean) with no transition. I am planning on using orthophotos which in the ocean side can be faded to blend with the water, but in the case of the lagoon it wont have the nice water effects that X-Plane has.

[greggerm]

I read somewhere, perhaps in this forum that there are two or maybe more ways to represent water bodies in OSM and that X-Planes global scenery designers only used one of them.

 

Indeed - I've done extensive reading on the subject, as cartography has always been a little hobby of mine in addition to flight simming. There are a few ways XP10 translates OpenStreetMap data into water, and I'm well versed in at least the map-side tagging needed for all. In addition, they've updated how they'll be getting their water data for the new scenery recuts, so in most cases, if the water is present in OSM, it'll end up present in one form or another in XP10. If there's missing water in the OSM map, I'd like to know where so I can draw it in with the hopes that it gets into the sim at some point.

[alpilotx]

Here is a very interesting study, which has made some statistics about the OSM coastline quality (I found this while searching infos about Alaskas OSM coast - which is mostly from a 3rd party source, PGS ... Prototype Global Shoreline ... and the quality is not soooo overwhelming).

 

Assessing the OpenStreetMap coastline data quality

[greggerm]

... and the quality is not soooo overwhelming

 

Yeah, the PGS coasts are, shall we say, lacking. I think OSM lost some coastline fidelity when they had to change licensing models.

 

Those are a bit tough to work on because often times, the nodes are shared with other objects. It's very easy to delete the entire coastline segment and then re-trace it, but if you have shared nodes, it all goes to heck...

 

I have a new method for water though - created an export script at "Overpass" to only pull water elements I want to see - feed it into JOSM - then overlay an aerial image. Instantly able to see what lakes/ponds are missing, and which are there in the area pulled. Not good for HUGE areas, but good enough to get more work done.

Edited April 29, 2013 by greggerm

[whiskeyportal]

I'm a surveyor/cartography for a living and OSM data accuracy is laughable at best. We looked into using some of their data for locating houses ect. and much of their data is so random and just flat out wrong we found it unusable. The shorelines are the worst. Rivers a close second. What I really loved about the other sim was the ability to add your own, well anything really. You could make the sim ground features as realistic as you wanted. Especially with the kml2bgl tool. I wish Laminar would step away from OSM data and/or make it so that the user could add/edit water and terrain features ourselves, because what they have going on now just isn't working IMO. XP10 has been out for almost 1 1/2 years now. How many OSM data cuts have they made in that time?

[Ntr09]

More on that topic, A large lake near where I live called "Dale Hollow Lake" was in XP9, and is in openstreetmap. Guess what? It's not in XP10. Why? I dunno. No good reason I'm sure...

 

-NR

[alpilotx]

NR,

 

I think you did not read too much about the OSM topic, didn't you? Otherwise you would know why your lake is until now missing in XP10 ...

 

Before I go in depth, here are some quite detailed posts by Ben Supnik (one of the X-Plane devs) on his Blog:

 

http://developer.x-plane.com/2011/12/where-is-my-water-the-roadmap-for-osm-and-vectors/

http://developer.x-plane.com/2013/04/dsf-recuts-some-basics/

 

From the latter you will see, that the simple reason is, that the current Global Scenery is based on Data from July 2011 ... so, if your lake was not in then, then its of course still missing now. But as the latter link shows you, Laminar is just in the process of doing some DSF re-cuts (well, effectively I am doing most of the raw, basic data processing), which will step-by-step bring the scenery up to date (in respect to OSM features). And thats what this post from Greg was about. Asking for places, where people are still missing some water (and don't feel fit to add them themselves in OSM).

[Cameron]

From the latter you will see, that the simple reason is, that the current Global Scenery is based on Data from July 2011 ... so, if your lake was not in then, then its of course still missing now.

 

I understand all you have said. Even still, that lake in discussion appears to have been built in 1943. More on it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale_Hollow_Reservoir

[alpilotx]

Yes, I am sure that lake existed much longer, but it was not ADDED to OSM before July 2011    ... and thats what counts for the scenery. As all vector information is now (since XP10) sourced from OpenStreetmap (for good reasons - even if some people might disagree), the scenery can only contain features, which are already in OSM at the time when the data gets pulled and processed.

[Cameron]

Yes, I am sure that lake existed much longer, but it was not ADDED to OSM before July 2011

 

Doh!

[greggerm]

More on that topic, A large lake near where I live called "Dale Hollow Lake" was in XP9, and is in openstreetmap.

 

You want to know what's funny?

 

I added most of Dale Hollow Lake into OSM on FRIDAY.

 

(*My wife lived for a while down in Tennessee, and I had some FSEconomy FBO's down there too - I was following the Cumberland River upstream out of Nashville, and came up towards that area and noticed that Dale Hollow was missing. Traced it in Friday... believe it or not.)

[LA]

Greg,

 

First off, thanks for your comments ...... in regards to "tourists" at the org. yesterday. I can't respond there. I'd have never bothered with the expense of

aircraft ownership, if it wasn't for looking at all of that ground scenery from the air. Lots of national parks, the Grand Canyon, Rocky mtns., etc. were just a short time away by air. Scenery has always been my number one reason for "real" flight. I have thousands of "air to ground", photos to proove it!

 

Other than that, I moved, and don't have a sim CPU hooked up at the moment. I heard, but don't know for sure, that a rather large lake (nothing like the Great Lakes) is missing in Utah. It's called Utah Lake, and is 30 miles south of the Great Salt Lake. An airport, KPVU is located on it's eastern shore.

[Ntr09]

Alpilotx, I actually do know why it's not included, I was just being sarcastic.

 

 

You want to know what's funny?

 

I added most of Dale Hollow Lake into OSM on FRIDAY.

 

(*My wife lived for a while down in Tennessee, and I had some FSEconomy FBO's down there too - I was following the Cumberland River upstream out of Nashville, and came up towards that area and noticed that Dale Hollow was missing. Traced it in Friday... believe it or not.)

 

Small world! This is interesting because I could have sworn that lake wasn't in OSM a year or two ago when I was trying to figure out why it wasn't in XP10.

 

Thanks for adding it, let's hope it finds it's way to XP10 now.

 

-NR

[greggerm]

It's called Utah Lake, and is 30 miles south of the Great Salt Lake. An airport, KPVU is located on it's eastern shore.

 

Larry, I'm disappointed in you...

 

STEP ONE: Visit www.openstreetmap.org and LOOK to see if the water you are missing is on the map - zoom in close to be sure. If it IS there, great! No work is needed, and if the scenery is recut, the water should show up. If it is NOT there, move on to step two.

(I will be very disappointed if you do not perform step one....)

 

Evil grin.

 

Utah Lake is indeed in OSM already and if the re-cut is performed in that area, it should show up! Thanks for the tip on a possible work area though!

 

Cheers!
-Greg

[Sigmoid]

In the demo, there is a lake south of KSEA with several roads in it.... And I don't mean bridges, they are suburban cul-de-sacs.

 

You should add a functionality to the terrain preprocessing tools, so that if roads are in water without being marked a bridge or a tunnel, it would at flash a warning or something.

Edited May 1, 2013 by Sigmoid

[alpilotx]

You should add a functionality to the terrain preprocessing tools, so that if roads are in water without being marked a bridge or a tunnel, it would at flash a warning or something.

That would mean 67.982 flashing warnings .... and with a global scenery, which must be processed unattended (kind of ... of course, many tests, experiments etc. try to avoid a lot of issues, but there is absolutely no way to validate the entire planet ... thats impossible), this is not a good option (as many of those roads are usually bridges - even if they don't have the tag ... and who are we to decide, if that small road in Tibet is now really a bridge or a data error ).

[Sigmoid]

That would mean 67.982 flashing warnings .... and with a global scenery, which must be processed unattended (kind of ... of course, many tests, experiments etc. try to avoid a lot of issues, but there is absolutely no way to validate the entire planet ... thats impossible), this is not a good option (as many of those roads are usually bridges - even if they don't have the tag ... and who are we to decide, if that small road in Tibet is now really a bridge or a data error ).

 

That, of course, is obvious. There should be some way to write a proper validation code in a way that the computer would understand... 99% of all bridges in the world are straight or uniformly curved, single roads with both ends on dry land. They rarely terminate, split or loop back into themselves over water.

[greggerm]

In the demo, there is a lake south of KSEA with several roads in it.... And I don't mean bridges, they are suburban cul-de-sacs.

 

Can you look in www.openstreetmap.org to see if the roads still terminate in the lake you're referencing? If they do, let me know the lake name/area so I can jump in and repair it.

 

As Alpilotx points out, there would likely be thousands of potential conflicts like the ones you're talking about... as well as conflicts where a continuous road seems to jut out into a lake and then return to land - due to either an inaccurate shoreline OR an inaccurate road following the shoreline. Since there's no real rhyme and reason to which of these data errors it might be, it's probably best to try and fix them at the source in OSM rather than have the X-Plane scenery logic try to interpret what is going on and fix it there.

 

Frankly, I'm surprised I haven't received more tips for missing water in OSM. In the meantime, I'm trying to smooth out some jagged PGS coastlines in New England... that's a lot of work in and of itself.

 

-Greg

[Sigmoid]

It's not the roads that are wrong, it's the shoreline. The islands are missing in XPlane.

 

http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=47.216&lon=-122.157&zoom=13&layers=M

[greggerm]

The islands are missing in XPlane.

 

Now that they are in OSM as seen on the map link, the islands should appear when the scenery is rebuilt for that area in the coming months.

[alpilotx]

OK, but now they seem to be there in OSM ... which is all we need. Then with the next re-cut of the DSFs, the islands will show up in X-Plane too (as its true for all other changes in OSM ... thats why Greg is doing so much - great - work).

 

By the way - a little, unofficial heads up - I think, the OSM deadline will be around the last week of May! But this doesn't mean, that new scenery will become available immediately after this date. This only means, that the data in OSM around this deadline will form the basis for the upcoming scenery updates (and quite likely, I will also use it for e new version of my HD Mesh ... for the entire USA / Europe etc.)

Edited May 2, 2013 by alpilotx

[alpilotx]

 

Edited May 2, 2013 by alpilotx

[greggerm]

By the way - a little, unofficial heads up - I think, the OSM deadline will be around the last week of May!

 

Noted. Thanks!

[TheLakeDaddy]

Lake Cumberland in south central Kentucky is missing as well as the Cumberland River that flows from the lake through Nashville Tn. and on to the Mississippi River. Lake Cumberland is 103 miles long and has 1,100 miles of shore land. It was impounded in 1952. It is a significant visual and map landmark for pilots. Flying VFR I often use rivers and lakes to navigate. This simulator has disappointed me.