So I got bored today and figured id do something cool with the Roblox engine that it wasn’t really meant for. Openstreetmaps will let you export a section of a map to an OSM file which in reality is in XML format. I took the XML and translated it to JSON and then changed the JSON formatting a bit so it worked as a LUA table, this LUA table is huge. The table contains “nodes”, and “ways”. Each node defines a point on the map, and then the “way” has a table within it defining which nodes are inside that “way”. So basically you come up with something like this:
From openstreetmaps of my university:
Nodes:
Ways connecting the nodes, along with color coordination:
Each of the ways has alot of information about that section inside it, it tells you if its a road, or a building, or a river, and its name, along with that if its a road it even has a place for speed limits. All of this information is inside the JSON, for this set above the JSON was about 27,000 lines long. I tried to do an entire city and the file was just way too big to handle, but I might figure out a solution. This can technically be used anywhere in the world and then direct import it into Roblox, pretty cool!
-Widgeon
Definitely something that gives unlimited possibilities (but then again, No Man’s Sky is also with a - well, unlimited amount of content to explore. I’m just of the opinion that the variation of gameplay can prove lacking with such vast amounts of exploration).