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.