benny

good job I'm not working on osm2xp since a long time, so it's nice to see someone working on a new osm tool The last thing i was working on (and that wasn't released, as it was wip) is the use of objects as much as possible instead of facades. I think that's the thing to do if we want a better looking scenery, because let's face it, facades are not really good looking. The approach was more or less to have a description of each 3D object (size, type etc), and when finding an osm polygon that can hold the object in terms of dimensions (and that comply with osm user rules), rotate it to the right position and place it. Problem, those 3D objects had to comply to some rules, like therotation point at 0/0 to be able to place them at the right angle/position. So that would need some 3D work to have enough 3D objects for as much osm buildings as possible. So some limitations, but that was working and looking better than facades. Another interesting thing i also was working on was to place light sources based on osm tags, it was an idea from Olli (from truscenery) and it's giving great results. It's also a feature where you need some 3D work to have light objects. So as Andrea said, artworks are the key to good looking sceneries. Cheers Ben

Hello, Here is the area of Seattle in osm database, http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=47.642&lon=-122.237&zoom=9&layers=M The building coverage is poor, but the forests seems fine, how the map coverage compare to your xplane scenery? By the way there is a way to have Seattle fully covered with buildings, using a public state shapefile with osm2xp. It's a bit more hard to do than the "usual" but it's possible. here are a few screens of what you can get with this file (before/after - skycrappers are from a third party addon, seems it's from XsimReviews' Simmon) : http://images.osm2xp.com/seattle/1before.jpg http://images.osm2xp.com/seattle/1after.jpg http://images.osm2xp.com/seattle/2before.jpg http://images.osm2xp.com/seattle/2after.jpg I Think that the file i used is here : http://files.osm2xp.com/shapefiles/ Please note that i'm currently building a website that will distribute generated xplane scenery , and this kind of file will be available on it, but i can't give a release date. Regards Ben

The -Xmx parameter is the maximun ammount of ram that the java virtual machine will be able to use. 2048 should be enough for most places. (the only limit to this parameter is that you must have the choosen value as free ram when launching the java app. giving more ram to osm2xp won't make it faster, it will just prevent crashes on a tile with a lot of buildings)

Hi Liz, You have to add more memory to osm2xp. Just put a higher value in the "-Xmx" parameter in the .ini file of osm2xp. Ben

osm2xp v 2.0.2 available http://osm2xp.com Ben

anyone tried the new efis function? (50€ for 3D data for France , i would like at least to see how it looks before buying the data addon) edit : found this very shakky vid

updated to 2.0.1 -Fixed osm height extraction bug. -Added a console output mode for debug purpose (advanced tab). -Removed some very low sloped roofs that could lead to potential xplane crash and were bad for performance. -Fixed street lights bug.

Hi Arti, Yeah sure, as soon as we'll have more information on xp10 scenery developpement i will use every new feature possible. Ben

Height extraction fixed, no more crashs and good height values , an exemple on business district of la Defense, Paris : I'll update the files tomorow after a few more tests.

Same place, same settings, virtual cockpit on 3 different xp10 aircrafts:

Just made a few more tests, well for an early version i'm hooked. Performance wise i think it's good, if it can be optimised for the final release it's gonna be awesome A test on LFMT , G2XPL orthophoto, 120'000 buildings generated from openStreetMap, 25 fps (i7 950, hd6970, 4gb ram)

I think the defaut settings are really bad, the first time you launch xp10 it's hell on earth After a bit of tweaking i had a good result, i gave a try on a xp9 orthophoto with lots of objects and i have more or less the same performance, i can even add some of xp10 new stuff and keep good fps.

Those "annotated OBJs" are really a nice feature Thanks for those informations!

Hi Tom, I'm really interested in evolutions of the facade file format, can you give information on this point? Will laminar publish something like this page for xp10 soon? Thanks. Ben

And a last picture