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In my previous post I provided a brief description of how we’re going to use OpenStreetMap data in X-Plane 10.  How do you get involved?  Map your area; improve the quality of OpenStreetMap where you live.

  • If roads or waterbodies are missing, incomplete or wrong, fix them!  If they’re missing information, add it.
  • Please respect OpenStreetMap’s community. We are new guests in their house.  Take a little time to learn about OSM and how their work proceeds.
  • Get in touch with local OSM chapters for your area; there may be non-X-Plane OSM users working in your area already.
  • Please create high quality mapping data, not just useful data for X-Plane.  For example, X-Plane does not use street name information, but nearly everyone else who uses OSM does.  If your street is missing, please add the name, not just the road type.
  • When working on OSM, please try to make OSM match reality – don’t worry about what “looks good” in X-Plane.  OSM should match real life, and X-Plane should do its best to recreate this view.  Please do not hack OSM data to make X-Plane look better!!!!  (I can’t think of any case where you’d want to do this – the scenery creation process works best when the data is accurate.)

A brief note to users in the United States: the US is a little bit different from other OSM countries because we have more free data than Europe.  As a result, the US OSM data has been “seeded” with imports of data like TIGER and NHD.  (For more on this, I recommend Steve Coast’s SOTM.US keynote video.)  The result is that while unmapped areas in other countries tend to be empty, unmapped areas in the US are often filled in with data that is present but not particularly good.

So if you live in the US, take a look at your home town.  Some of the most common problems are: incorrect road types or incorrect one-way information, missing bridges, and missing water bodies.  To meet the level of quality that OSM already has in Europe (have you seen what the Germans have mapped?!?!) the imported free data needs a scrubbing by real human beings who know the area.

About Ben Supnik

Ben is a software engineer who works on X-Plane; he spends most of his days drinking coffee and swearing at the computer -- sometimes at the same time.

11 comments on “OSM: How Can You Help?”

  1. Are you going to use forest data in global scenery? If you have accurate water bodies, streets, roads, railway lines and hopefully city shapes, then… navigating with real VFR map should be possible 🙂

    1. Not for the first pass, no. Generally, we are only planning (for the v10 cut) at this point on using the data listed in the previous post.

      2. If you’re not going to use OSM data for forest, are you going to use better data from an other source? Forest in europe where not that good in xp9.

        Anyway it looks really promising. I hope you can achieve all your objectives!

        Denver

        1. It is beyond the scope of the global scenery to ship the _most_ accurate possible forest data – I don’t think the global scenery will for example, ever be more accurate than the custom packs that Alpilotx and Albert put out. It’s a question of DVD space.

          1. Yes, that might be true. But from my understanding we will be quite a bit better with XP10 forests than XP9 was. At least they are derived from the same high quality data source as our custom forests were … so it is only a question of the processing (and how we tune it to make the result fit in the limited DVD space).
            To be honest, I hoped, that my custom forests won’t be needed anymore for XP10 (would be quite a PITA to bring all the data and scripts up to the latest level etc.). But this doesn’t mean, that there aren’t ideas floating around (in my head) about “improved” ….uhm … scenery packs.

          2. I will say this:
            – We are very lucky to have Andras and Albert working on the global scenery!!!!!!
            – But I can’t guarantee that their work on the global scenery will be as detailed as what they can do in custom scenery, simply due to distribution requirements.
            This goes beyond forests…we’ve talked about whether we could produce base meshes at higher mesh res than the global scenery. The bottom line is there’s a ton of data out there and a ton we can do . Global scenery is the beginning, not the end.

  2. The easiest way to edit is to use the in-browser Potlatch. As Ben mentioned, one of the biggest problems is missing bridge data. To add a bridge, you need to “break” the way into three connected segments (before the bridge, the bridge itself, and after the bridge), and then increase the level so that the bridge is above ground level (this is easily overlooked). I’m not sure if X-Plane will use the layers data, but if they do it could lead to some awesome looking elevated highway interchanges, such as http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=33.78069&lon=-117.8789&zoom=15&layers=M

    It’s worth mentioning that while most roads in the stock TIGER set look pretty good, railroads are often way out of kilter. I’d encourage mappers to place special focus on making sure railroads don’t have unrealistic bends and turns in them.

    There’s a lot of area where National Hydrography Dataset water data is missing. For a list of completed segments and instructions on how to add NHD to your area, visit http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/National_Hydrography_Dataset. If you add a basin or sub-basin, be sure to add it to the list of imported areas on the wiki.

  3. This is the first time I study openstreetmap. The detail it’s got is really amazing! Even places that are not very well known contain a lot of data.

    I think it’s great source material for a simulator like X-Plane. And there’s definitely more data that can be used. I do wonder whether the places will look right from up above compared to satellite images. Because houses, trees and roads have very diffident shapes and colors all over the world.

    This blog made me very interested about X-Plane 10!

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