AutoGen scenery for FlightGear

Description

Use the GNU GPL PixelCity project to create autogen support for FlightGear, to dynamically create cities for populating the FlightGear scenery procedurally.

PixelCity is at the moment C++ code that uses pure OpenGL with a fixed rendering pipeline (i.e. no shaders).

There is a blog column providing in-depth details about the implementation of PixelCity: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=2940

To view a demo video of PixelCity, please see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-d2-PtK4F6Y

Code

Official repositories:

• PixelCity at Google code
• PixelCity source code at github

Originally, PixelCity only built on Windows, but there are now a number of ports available:

• PixelCity (Linux)
• PixelCity port for Linux
• Another PixelCity Linux port

• PixelCity Mac OSX port
• Another Mac OSX port
• cmake based PixelCity build

Porting

• It really looks cool from the distance and close up.
• Implementing it into FlightGear requires porting the OpenGL calls to be OpenSceneGraph compatible, probably by implementing osgDrawable.
• The current implementation only shows night-time views, so this has to be tweaked, too.
• Another issue to take care of is interaction with existing scenery models, so the generated buildings do not interfere with our scenery models.
• The same is true for our landcover, roads and elevation data.
• Definitely worth some thinking. Probably as a google summer of code http://wiki.flightgear.org/index.php/GSoC project?
• Perhaps something using blended cities?
• You could input a street map and it would only build buildings in the lots, not on the roads.
• Now, maybe combine that with open street map or something?
• Also, you could then just load it fairly normally into flightgear.
• Instead of downloading the building, it could be an option to download the files needed to make it and do it yourself.

Threads

• http://flightgear.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=8837