RTB Lidar height plugin development

[les_neilson]

On another thread I've already been talking about a plugin I'm working on to import lidar data into RTB. For now it works only for uk data because it's based on a conversion of lat/long positions to uk grid references.

It's at a very early stage, but so far it's working reasonably well. If anyone's interested in using it, I'll try to make something useable available as soon as I can, and help out as far as possible, but be aware that a bit of work will be needed by users to prepare their source data. I use QGIS, a free app to read and convert data that can be found on these sites:

remotesensingdata.gov.scot for scotland,

environment.data.gov.uk for england, and

lle.gov.wales

England has the best overall coverage, mostly at 1m resolution, but there are some areas with good coverage at 50cm. The scottish site has recently released a phase 3 dataset with a large area of the south and east of the country at 50cm resolution. Data formats vary among the sites, and also on how recent the data is.

I use QGIS to convert the data to .asc format, which is a plain text file containing an array of height values, which is the simplest thing I've found to work with. QGIS takes a bit of getting used to, but I'm steadily finding ways to streamline the workflow. Once I've fixed some bugs and do some more testing, I hope this might be a worthwhile addition to the functionality of RTB...

[millen]

Awesome, this sounds great! Should be a very worthwhile feature.
I'm not in need of it's use at the moment, but just wanted to post and say thanks for your hard work to contribute to this little community. RTB is quite often shunned in the track modding community, but I feel it is ever so slowly getting a bit better.

Don't suppose you could expand the plug-ins abilities out to Australia next? haha
Thanks again, keep up the good work.

[les_neilson]

Point me in the direction of some australian lidar and I'll have a look at it. Not promising anything, mind you ;^)

[RTB]

Have you played around with the front end side of things (where the slider was/is?). You could potentially add options for location of files.

Since you're relying on a 3rd party plugin for the conversion of coordinates, I wonder if it would be simpler to keep this as a UK lidar plugin, and create a separate one for other areas? Or if you can also add an option to the front end to select the Conversion type.

[les_neilson]

Haven't looked at front end stuff yet. Definitely it needs a datafile location selector at least. It would probably make sense to keep it as uk only, but only because I haven't looked into data from other regions, so I've no idea if it would be simple or not to implement. One thing I'd like to do at some point is use varying levels of detail where available. For example I have a single dataset covering almost the whole of england at 10m resolution, then specific areas at 1m, and 50cm. It would be nice to automatically pick the highest res data available

[Darxide]

Man, I'd love this. I've put most of my tracks on hold because Google just isn't accurate enough.

[les_neilson]

Exactly! I spent so much time trying to match stuff by eye using google street view.

[Situne]

Hi !
Just wanted to chime in here to say that we are working on a GeoTIFF plugin that does height from LIDAR data in Norway, it can read basic GeoTiFFs now, although still a bit rough, it does the job now :-)
I can make a new topic for it if somebody is interested in testing it out :-)

Ole

[les_neilson]

I'd be interested in having a look at that. If you like we can compare notes regarding progress and development. Feel free to open a separate thread for it in any case

[Situne]

Hi Les !

That's great !, I posted a new thread for it with the GitHub repo:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/388980/discussions/0/2945872608906391470/

[les_neilson]

I'll do the same with mine. Just need to figure out how github works now...

[les_neilson]

Progress report: producing good results for small area venues, but I'm still finding problems when trying to generate larger projects. This is because I have to load large data files as and when I get requests for lat/longs and I can't sort them easily. Even with the data files on an SSD, it takes 20 seconds to load each one. To improve things I need to hold multiple data blocks in memory, but they're large, 10k by 10k of doubles. Ideally I should sort the requests by the data file they need, then load the relevant upcoming data block in a background thread. There's going to be a learning curve to this...

Brendon: what's the maximum number of requests that gets sent out? Would there be a way of sorting these and responding out of order?

[Tokki43]

how it's going?

[Lonnopo]

Any update on this?

[DeepJKL_FIN]

Originally posted by Lonnopo:

Any update on this?

Hi! This is pretty much the same idea but it writes and reads the data from SQL database. Here i a Steam discussion link, where you can find the instructions and dowload link:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/388980/discussions/0/3189115186376193341/