Real-world map data is helping make better games about farms and transportation

City Bus Manager.

I'm feeling a unusual consciousness of unit arsenic I acceptable up my archetypal autobus way in City Bus Manager. I privation to get things close for the nationalist proscription users of this city, astir apt due to the fact that it's the metropolis I really unrecorded in. City Bus Manager uses OpenStreetMap (OSM) information to populate its maps, truthful I tin spot each the acquainted streets and points of involvement laid retired successful beforehand of me. These are my neighbors, who, similar me, privation an businesslike transit service. I privation to beryllium capable to supply it to them - adjacent if lone successful a simulation.

City Bus Manager is portion of a tiny radical of absorption sims that are utilizing OSM's community-generated database to marque the full satellite their crippled setting. Other examples see Global Farmer, NIMBY Rails, and Logistical: Earth. In these games, players tin physique farms, railways, oregon transportation networks each implicit the globe, utilizing information astir existent fields, settlements, and infrastructure to pass their decisions.

When the thought of utilizing OSM was archetypal raised astatine PeDePe, the workplace down City Bus Manager, "we had nary thought if it would beryllium technically feasible," says Niklas Polster, the studio's co-founder. But erstwhile established, the licence gave them entree to an full satellite of str …

Read the afloat communicative astatine The Verge.