Hi all,
you might have seen my previous work on blender export.
http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=3352.0

Recently I have discovered the new game qwet quake world enemy
territory, it has huge landscapes and is very fast.
Ideally we would be able to use that engine to drive around in a city,
I can imagine long term a 3d world for interactive markup of osm data.

so, after people were asking about my work on irc,
I have updated the code for the openstreetmap to blender export ,
after there was more interest on the mailing list:

http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~kosova/%2Bjunk/openstreetmapkosova/annotate/head%3A/kmz_ImportWithMesh.py

The new version uses bevled curves for the streets, so you can extrude
them. It overcomes the previous blocky shape.

You can use the script like this :

0. start blender at least once and end it, it creates your ~/.blender dir
1. copy the py to ~/.blender/scripts/kmz_ImportWithMesh.py
2. export your osm to kml (sorry)
gpsbabel -i osm -f shkoderstreetsbig.osm -o kml -F shkoderstreetsbig.kml

I extracted only the highways for export.

3. then you can just select import/openstreetmap(kml) from the menu.

The bevel and taper objects could be tuned per street type:
http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-235a/taper-curves/

Here is where I got some of the new code from :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BMonSphere.jpg

I have not looked into textures and scaling, the resulting data is too big.

But at least the results look better now.

All this needs work, but it is a better starting point, and much
better than my previous work.

This should be the final output, something like this, for race car driving!
http://www.tutorialsforblender3d.com/Models/Tracks/Mountain_Valley.html

See my video example here, you can fly through the city. You can see
that the bevel is not perfect, needs to be flat.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hw9aW3iI5fs
sorry about the audio synch.....

mike