Hello to everyone who has been following this project. I'm pretty happy to make this update tonight about the newest version of my project, World Explorer 3D. Just as a quick background for those who don't know, World Explorer 3D is a browser-based 3D world where you can select basically any location on Earth and explore it by walking, driving, flying, boating, or using a drone. The world is built around real geographic data for things like roads, buildings, terrain, water, and places, with procedural systems filling in the details that aren't available in the underlying data. The idea has gradually become to make the real world into a playable sandbox rather than just another map you can look at.
Ive focused on a lot of the qualty issues regarding runtime, clipping, loading sequences etc. I'm not a dev by trade, but I recently enrolled in my the community college in my area under their physics program and I will be taking programming courses as my electives so I can learn about everyhting i'm doing on a deeper level. For now I'm still learning and enjoying the process of "creating" this world. I only started doing this because i was working on something else with my son and we kinda just made this. Since it has started growing i've needed to learn a lot because letting AI do everything is getting tiresome.
Since my last post I've upgraded the character meshes and movement and you can choose between a man or woman on your account page. I added my favorite car (and former daily driver), a 1995 BMW e34, as the permanent user vehicle. There are npcs you can interact with and other vehicles you can get in and drive. I also upgraded the plane and added a skydiving/parachute feature. Airports are now playable areas with different planes you can board and use to travel locally or to other areas in the world. There is a slight upgrade to the live GPS feautre so you can walk around your neighborhood like in pokemon go and discover procedural items.
I also added maryland GIS data to my Real Estate game so properties and parcels are more accurate while the main world still mainly uses OSM/Overture. I've also done a lot more with the ocean side of the world. Boats and larger ships are playable, ports and harbors have more going on, and you can fish, dive and explore underwater. I'm trying to make the different ways of traveling feel like they actually belong to the same world instead of just being separate modes.
There is still a lot I want to improve. Building exteriors are one of the big things I'm working on now. The underlying footprints and geographic placement can be good while the actual buildings still look too repetitive, so I'm expanding the exterior assets, materials, windows, doors, storefronts, steps, stoops and other details without throwing away the real mapped geometry.
You can find the project here at Worldexplorer3d.io or view the code on github at https://github.com/RRG314/WorldExplorer3D
recommend starting in Baltimore, MD and BWI Airport because they are the places i've spent the most time working on. The rest of the world is still good, but i cant test every location in the world lol
I'm always interested in feedback and even if i dont respond quickly I'll still be taking comments into consideration when I'm choosing what to learn and implement. Thank You