GeoSim

Since the last dev log, I’ve mostly been working on improving the appearance and detail of the buildings in GeoSim.
I started by working on procedural textures for the building materials. Instead of having buildings use mostly flat colors, I added procedural textures for things like brick, concrete, plaster, metal, and glass. I also added stuff like roughness maps so the different materials react to lighting differently. I did this to make the buildings feel more varied without having to rely on a huge collection of texture files. I worked extra on glass to make it look more like an actual glass facade rather than just a blue colored shiny wall.
After that, I moved on to windows. I added procedural windows that are generated based on the building itself, so I don’t have to manually model them or something. I also added different window styles for different types of buildings, so residential buildings can look different from offices and industrial buildings. There were a few problems with the windows. For example, windows were being generated on surfaces where they shouldn’t be, including horizontal faces and things like roof structures or antennas. I added logic to make sure windows are only placed on vertical surfaces and improved the checks used to determine the parts that should receive windows. I also tuned the settings for quite a while till I was satisfied.
Once the windows were looking better, I started focusing more on performance. The procedural textures were lagging stuff, so I made some changes to improve performance. I also added chunks to the building batching system. This will make it simple to add tiling later since the performance right now is not really the best and treating the whole map as one big area is the cause of it I think.
Next I want to continue adding architectural details, starting with enterances and then balconies. After that I’ll move on to things like roofs, roads, and terrain, before eventually getting into environmental details like trees and the actual disaster simulations.

Since the last dev log, I’ve mostly been working on the visual side of GeoSim and trying to make the environment feel less like a bunch of basic geometry.
I started by adding a proper sky to the scene. I spent quite a bit of time tweaking the sky settings until I got something I was happy with. It makes a pretty big difference compared to having a plain black background.
After that I moved on to clouds. I wanted something more interesting than just putting a few transparent cloud textures in the sky, so I ended up implementing procedural volumetric clouds using a 3D noise texture and ray marching using GLSL. The clouds have multiple layers of procedural noise to control their shape and detail, along with a separate procedural mask to give them a more natural form. I also added some basic volumetric lighting so they react to the sun and ambient light instead of just looking like white blobs.
The clouds are also animated, so the volume slowly moves through the sky rather than staying completely static. Getting them to actually look good took quite a bit of experimenting with the different settings like density, coverage, etc.
Once I had the clouds looking good, I ran into a problem I was pretty much expecting which was reduced performance. Well the performance wasn’t really good to begin with and the clouds made it worse. So I spent some time optimizing the clouds and managed to get a pretty significant performance improvement without sacrificing the looks too much.
After that, I decided to optimize the buildings too while I was at it. Before, the way I was generating building geometry was doing a lot more work than necessary, so I implemented geometry batching. This ended up making the performance a whole lot better.
At this point the project has a good looking sky, clouds and is pretty performant. So next I want improve the appearance of the buildings. Right now they still look like like blocks so I want to start using the data I am pulling to generate things like windows, entrances, balconies, and other architectural details when the information is available. For buildings where that information isn’t available, I want to procedurally generate the details based on the building’s shape, type, etc. I also want to improve the building materials and add textures so that different buildings feel less alike and then I’ll move to roofs, roads, and terrain and also stuff like trees and then simulating stuff like floods.

Since the last dev log, I’ve been working on actually making more use of the building data I’m pulling from OSM and improving how the buildings look in the scene.
I added a basic building feature extraction system that takes things like entrances, windows, balconies, parking areas, and garages from the data and then associates them with the buildings they belong to, using things like proximity and address information to make the matching more reliable. I have to do this because features and buildings are given as separate objects but this gives me a good foundation for eventually generating these details onto the 3D buildings instead of keeping buildings as mundane blocks.
I also started building a material system for the buildings. Buildings can now use different materials based on their building type and material information, while explicit colors are used when available. I also added some procedural variation to buildings using the same material so they don’t look completely identical. The system right now is really basic and doesn’t look too good but it makes everything look a little bit better.
While working on the materials, I ran into a pretty annoying z fighting issue between overlapping building parts. It took a really long time to figure it out but I eventually fixed it by introducing a tiny vertical offset between building parts, preventing those surfaces from fighting with each other.
At this point I’m shifting more toward the visuals of the project. I mean the building data is becoming pretty detailed, so I think the best next step is figuring out how to turn that data into neat visuals. I want to start generating windows, balconies, entrances, and other architectural details either procedurally or from the data when that information is available. Other than that I also want to work on things like roofs to really make the city realistic. After that I’ll work on adding stuff like terrain and infrastructure like roads before moving on to implementing the disasters like floods, etc.

Since the last dev log, I’ve been working on making the buildings a lot more accurate and improving how the map data is handled.
The biggest change was improving the building data coming from OpenStreetMap. Buildings can now use their actual height when it’s available, with building levels and other information being used when it isn’t. I also added Wikidata as a fallback for buildings where OSM doesn’t have enough information. This makes the buildings look much closer to the real world.
I also improved the geometry handling including better support for outer geometry and multipolygon buildings, which makes the overall city representation more accurate especially for more complicated buildings.
Along the way I cleaned up some of the Three.js setup, improved the error screen with a retry button, and increased the test areato better test all of the changes.
There’s still a lot to improve, especially with performance since larger areas with a lot of buildings can now lag. Stuff like caching and tiling will be important later so I don’t have to load everything at once. For now, though, the basic city data is starting to feel much more like an actual 3D representation of a real place rather than just a collection of blocks.
Next I want to make the buildings look even better by making use use of as much of the available building data as possible, including roofs, windows, entrances, balconies, building type, colors, materials, and other details that can be used in the 3D representation. This also means improving the data side of things. I’ve already started pulling a lot more information from OSM than I was at the beginning but I’ll need to pull more stuff.

I made a pretty big step forward with GeoSim. Instead of just displaying the raw data, I can now take it data and turn it into actual 3D buildings in the scene.
I first got the basic Three.js setup working by setting up the camera, controls, lighting and renderer before implementing the building creation logic. I also added a simple loading and error screen instead of leaving the page empty while the data is being loaded and also improved the old UI a little and also added a section that displays the coordinates of the current area.
The buildings themselves are still very basic for now. They’re mostly just simple blocks and some of their heights aren’t completely accurate yet. So now I want to work on fixing that and also making them look better using as much data provided by OSM as I can to make everything more accurate.

I established GeoSim’s initial foundation and built the very basic data pipeline. I set up the project structure, defined types I will use in the future such as bounding boxes and OSM related stuff, and integrated the OpenStreetMap Overpass API to fetch building related data such as geometry for a predefined test area for now. I also added a simple interface to display the raw data before I actually start converting it into actual 3D buildings.
I also ran into something called CORS issue when calling Overpass directly from the browser, so I added a Vercel serverless API route to request Overpass and that fixed it. Along the way I also came through many other weird API related issues so I eventually switched from the overpass-api.de endpoint to another public Overpass instance hosted by Mail.ru and now stuff seems to be working.
Next, I’ll move from only displaying the raw OSM building data to turning it into actual 3D geometry using Three.js.