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

There's a bug on v2 that can lead to bad dsf files that makes xplane crash, i'm on it, i'll update the files asap. The last post of austin made me take a few shots for fun , here's a bit of openStreetMap plausible world

On the contrary it's good that xplane10 is coming so quick! I'll be able to do something much more pretty with xplane10 enhancements (facade roof tiling, 3D objects "decoration" on facades) , i will have lots of 3D lego objects to place (plus the object library Tkyler is talking on this forum). The global lightning will add to the eye candy, as the osm roads, seems we will be able to add a lot more of 3D objects with good performance (so we can think on some eye candy stuff like add cars on parkings, street lights on houses, stuff like that). The xplane autogen will be very nice for some places like USA, but on countries with good osm coverage like France, i think that full osm generated scenery will be outstanding on xp10. Osm2xp v2 was writen with xp10 in mind, now i have something clean and easily scalable , so i'm waiting for xplane10 to go head down

Hi Lukasz, Ortophotos are generated with "G2XPL".

Yeah i'm working on XHT with premek and artoo. I'm working alone on osm2xp. Another thing about the result on xplane, in some countries that 's not very nice, i think for you (Australia) it won't be very good. To generate good result osm2xp needs very precise open street map data, like what we have in france. For some places in openstreetmap you have big huge blocks insteads of dozen of little houses, the more detailled the data is in openStreetMap, the better in xplane. A few screens by MdMax with latest osm2xp version: http://ggka.online.fr/xp/lor38.jpg http://ggka.online.fr/xp/lor35.jpg

Hi Simmon, The scenery website is where i'm storing pre made scenery files. You can download files for nearly every place in the world there, the problem is that i didn't updated them since june, and it was made with osm2xp 1.1 so no sploped roofs for exemple, old data etc... So you'd better generate scenery yourself with the latest osm2xp version. I will update the scenery website as soon as posible, but i'm working on a brand new version, so i'm waiting to finish it before regenerating dsf files, here are a few WIP screens: About osm2xp , there's no "team", i'm alone on that project (with beta testers of course!) Maybe when i will make it open source people will want to work on it , maybe to support others flight sims. If someone is interested, a little technical part about how osm2xp works now: Osm2xp 2.0 was made with that in mind, make something modular that just read openStreetMap data and translate it to something readable for another software. Here's a little screen about the workflow and objects used: Parser, Translator and Writer are interfaces, in short they describe behaviors, and you can write objects that implement those "contracts". So right now, if you use osm2xp 2 to generate a dsf scenery from a .pbf file , here's what's going on: The .pbf file is given to a Pbf Parser implementation, which will read the osm data , put it in a more readable form, and send it to the translator. We're working for a dsf output, so the translator is a Dsf Translator, its job is to transform the data the parser sent him to something that will be written in a dsf output. That's where most of the job is done, check if the openStreetMap object that was sent is a building, an object or a forest, compute wich facade will be used, geometry checks to respect xplane facades specification etc... When the translator is done, it sends the transformed data to the writer, in our case a Dsf Writer , that will write this data in a .dsf file (the writer also do other things around the dsf file, like write the header, polygons /objects declarations etc). Now let's imagine i want to add support for let's say flightGear, i just need to write an implentation of Translator and Writer object. Maybe i will also need to change something in the user interface? No problem , as osm2xp is built around eclipse rcp, i can write a new perspective for flighGear (perspective are a set of views and windows, right now there are 2 perspectives in osm2xp , configuration and build, but we can imagine in the future a xplaneConfiguration perspective, and a flightGearPerspective). These well separated layers are also nice to enhance/change what is generated, let's imagine i want to have osm2xp generate sim city like buildings into xplane, you know green/yellow/blue buildings , well i just need to write a new Translator for it, a few lines of code and i'm good. So with all these changes, it's now an open tool to transform OpenStreetMap data to something else, right now xplane, maybe tomorrow flightGear, flight, FarmingSimulator...

Osm2xp 2.0 is now available in the downloads area -> http://osm2xp.com It's a major release, nearly everything has been rewrited from scratch, but here are the major features: -New GUI, based on the eclipse rcp framework. -Generation rules can be imported/exported to xml. -Generation rules are more complex now, with more than one object file, and various parameters. -Better use of open street map height/levels tags. -Generation of xml and/or pdf stats files. -Embedded help window. -Osm2xp can now restart a crashed/closed generation job. just load the "osm2xp.project" file that was created at the root of your scenery folder. -Osm output format, for debug purpose or to extract a 1/1 tile from a bigger file. -Real time memory monitor. -More sloped roofs for houses. -Ini file ("osm2xp.ini" , in root folder of the application, for mac users under app/show content) to set the memory allocated to osm2xp (-Xms : min value, -Xmx : max value) A few updates should come in the next days/weeks , to enhance buildings quality in xplane, and to release a easy way for people to add their own textures. As soon as i will have made these updates , i'll make osm2xp open source. Also expect updates once x plane 10 is out, to take advantage of xp10 enhancements.

Last time i tried sketchup, i couldn't export to xplane, seems that marginal plugin doesn't works with latest sketchup version. Can someone confirm that?

Well with all these fsx articles i reinstalled it too. But i don't care about orbx , pmdg and these stuff, i only have interest in flying GA around my local area. So launched a quick fsearthTiles (=g2xpl) , and gave a look at scenery editing. One hour after, osm2xp is compiling bgl files, i made a try on Montpellier area, France, 220'000 buildings, and here's the result: link to full size screen : http://img64.imageshack.us/img64/1064/osm2fs.jpg 2.5 fps Well that's just a quick and dirty test, proof of concept is here, it's a lot easyer than xplane (you got a library of nice objects, can play with size , scale etc, no need for geometry checks for facades etc), now i gotta look if the sim can handle such a big number of objects with a few tweaks, dunno. With xplane i'm on 40+ fps on the same place with g2xpl+osm2xp+rex...

For now premek is writing documentation, we should start coding after our holydays, in a few weeks. Given the experience we have on openstreetmap data handling, the very precise goals premek has in mind wich will be very well documented, and the graphic/art skills of Artoo, i think we could hope for a good pace for xht

Hello guys Just did a first try at recording video in xplane, there's no fancy editing, views, just virtual cockpit (carenado saratoga) over Montpellier, south of France. Photoreal terrain is made with g2xpl at zoom 17, i'm also using REX, and building/forest/landmarks are generated from openStreetMap data with osm2xp. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DSb4LN2jK8?hd=1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fA4B8-O5dHQ?hd=1 Ben