One wonders if this could be used to populate scenery.....

If these footprints could be incorporated.......

https://osmbuildings.org/?lat=40.72265&lon=-73.94568&zoom=15&rotation=0&tilt=30

Quote from J van E

Yes, please... having all those buildings as grey objects would be nice already because right now I seldom have the idea I am flying over cities due to the lack of 3D buildings. It is a shame that quite often I can't even see I am getting close to a city because of this. And when I am near or over a city I have no clue what kind of city or neighbourhood it is because everything is flat and you get a totally wrong impression of it all. This still is my biggest problem with Aerofly FS 2.

Well gray might even be acceptable as a temporary measure, but what I was actually thinking was that it might be possible to come up with a program to automatically scale and assign textured facades to the shapes. I've seen programs that do something similar, and even though the facades wouldn't be authentic to the actual buildings, in most instances that's already the case anyway.

Just a random thought.

Quote from drhotwing1

The problem as you know might be the performance hit that comes with this solution. Look at NYC, that could have been much more populated than it currently is but the building count had to be reduced to fit into the performance model of FS 2. Now, something like this could possibly be done in groups, that might be meet performance vs. population.

Also, I see these particular models as ugly, but that's just my own personal opinion talking

This goes back to something I asked before about LOD's, as it's pretty obvious that AF draws buildings out to a pretty enormous distance, which yes would obviously affect performance if it was all filled with buildings. But does (or can) AF not use traditional scenery LOD to keep the number of buildings on screen at any one time manageable?

Edit: Hmmmm.... and I just found out X-Plane has started incorporating this, so apparently it's at least technically possible.

Quote from J van E

Hm, interesting... does this mean default XP11 will show all these buildings somehow...?

I had started a conversation about this with Tonywob, and he said his W2XP "mostly already supports" OSM3D tagging, and that the new autogen in X-plane 11 had begun using it as well. I suspect he means mostly height tags though, and not necessarily shape.

Still, the tech has appeared in X-plane previously, and I was thinking AF could do even better. On the other hand, perhaps the devs have something completely different in mind.

This shows how it could work, though. (However the facades shown here are mostly very bland, probably due to memory constraints at the time?)