FlightGear Newsletter April 2013: Difference between revisions

Dresden, Germany ([http://flightgear.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=18851 EDDC]) and Innsbruck, Austria ([http://flightgear.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=19625 LOWI]) have recently been populated with about 50,000 buildings derived from openstreetmap data. The buildings are textured with hi-res facade and roof images. While this certainly improves visual impression over the current random buildings, rendering a huge number of individual models in a scene is quite demanding. The FG process eats ~3GB RAM when flying in those areas, you might see a severe fps hit, and the download is ~50 MB each. However, the buildings respect LOD settings, and there's work underway to also reduce the memory footprint.

The conversion is done by [[Osm2city.py|osm2city.py]], currently being [https://gitorious.org/fg-radi/osm2city developed] by forum user radi. The approach is similar to [[OpenStreetMap_buildings#Tools|bob.pl]] or forum user Soitanen's scripts, (or osm2xp for X-Plane), both of which have been [http://www.flightgear.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=17598 discussed] in the forums. Being at a rather early stage of development, osm2city.py is currently not very user-friendly. You probably should know some python if you want to use it yourself.