Well, theoretically anyone could create new tiles – the code to create the tiles is open source, and pretty much all of the data is publicly available. We may be able to help in some way. But the road data you get from us undergoes a fairly different process than Osm2XP. We’ll find some way to cope with OSM – but I can’t map out that entire process now.

Hi David,

Sorry to beat you over the head with this but I really have to be absolutely clear on this.

No. You cannot expect to receive the latest OSM with each release. You cannot expect any updates to the global scenery.

LR has _never_ at any point indicated publicly that we will update the global scenery post ship.

We _may_ decide to do that at some point; many people have asked for it and it would be nice.

But I need to make clear that we are _not_ advertising scenery updates with the sim.

The reason I have to bash on this is simple: I don’t want anyone to buy X-Plane and then come to us and go “I payed XXX, and you promised me free updates to the global scenery.” We have made no such promise. Maybe in the future, but we have not yet signed up for this.

cheers
Ben

The simplification is more complex than DP because we have to keep the roads topologically correct – that is, we can’t simplify such that two non-crossing roads simplify into an intersection. The algorithm we use comes from a paper whose title I can’t recall, but I think it’s cited in the scenery tools source. (Of course, the source is there too if you want to read it.) We use a Delauney triangulation – I think I might have blogged it.

http://hacksoflife.blogspot.com/2011/05/mesh-simplification-part-iii.html

Yeah – for users who can afford to crank settings, we can always subdivide the beziers into a larger number of small segments (since the graphics card is going to need lines and not curves in the end). So this gives us scalability and the ability to make a really nice looking high-end visualization. We’re already pulling the same trick with airports.

Is that assumption correct?