Would love to know that. If they use that, I would try to improve my area with more realistic height, because most of the building in OSM use the default 1 floor building.
I edited some building heights in my local area before Xmas on OSM. I also added some missing buildings. Was hoping the changes would filter through to the sim. But they haven’t.
I remember there was a tower in Melbourne, AU at some point caused by invalid OSM data, so I would say they use it. The quesion is more how often do they update it with in the Sim.
I don’t think MS derives scenery elevation (DEM) from Google data. People who have attempted to import Google data into MSFS noticed height differences. There could be some common ground, though… Suppose they wouldn’t share data directly… Google Earth could make use of the same data source… In fact the elevation data for MSFS and for Google earth are both contained in .DEM files. I have one I use in MSFS for Norway, that originates from a source in Norway, distributing their data via flightsim.to.
Maybe there exists a much better DEM for your country on flightsim.to than current MSFS or Google Earth can provide. Prepare for a BIG download, though… These are multi-gig files !
OpenStreetMap is not Google. And this thread is not about DEM either.
Yes, they use data from OSM for various things, as far as I know the building height, in some cases the building type (churches, parkings,…) and also the position of the power towers.
But noone knows when and if they update the data from OSM.
Anyway, edit whatever you can to have more accurate OSM data. It benefits not only the sim
Ah I was far off topic folks, I’m sorry, mainly language misunderstanding here… I interpreted “building height data” as “building elevation data”… and “open street map” with “google street map”.
Building heights
In any case there are generic buildings in the BGL scenery file for FSX. That BGL record and the same code 0xa0 is still used by the MSFS 2020 version. Building templates are part of the scenery file format, so building heights must be prepared from certain data too…
If you want to do it yourself… in fact this becomes a scenery SDK question, how it is normally corrected in MSFS as follows…
You can override things, replace scenery with the SDK…
If you want to make a scenery of your neighbourhood in the SDK, you would first create a polygon, to exclude the existing scenery. When there is elevation, several polygons. Then you could then use building templates, which translate into these generic buildings… or you could choose from the “objects” list. These are existing handcraft buildings, you can also place these.
I believe OSM is one of the data sources that is fed to the Blackshark AI to generate the world. I don’t believe it’s the only data source for building height though. Who knows what the AI decides on if it gets conflicting data sources
I doubt they would download (or let us download??) these things life from OSM. It’s like Bing data at some places… it’s newer than say, december 2020, it could be april 2021… or even later… but it’s not really life data. If you expect your edits in OSM will appear soon in MSFS, you can test that easily: just switch off your cache and see what happens. Chance you’ll have to wait a few weeks… or months ?
Same here, corrected some building height info in OSM over at South East Asia 6 months ago and until now isn’t reflect in the sim, so I stopped flying around place I’m really familiar with.
From the last dev Q&A, Martial said they haven’t updated the OSM data in the sim since launch. It’s on their “to do” list, but they haven’t gotten around to it yet.
Yep, I head that remark during the Q/A. Sounds promising, and if they can use the community to help as was suggested that can only be a step in the right direction.
This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.