Google post
I can't remember the most recent time I've seen this posted (or where), but I've seen it crop up a bit in the major Flight Sim forums:
Microsoft should use Google Earth for Flight Simulator.
Leave aside for the moment the fact that Microsoft has a rival product gaining steam, the point is people like the idea of highly detailed and accurate satellite imagery-- especially of the sort Google Earth provides-- all streamed over the internet.
At first blush it sounds pretty cool, yeah?
"There's my house!" (speaking of the here's my house thing, check this link out for the ultimate in here's my houseness)
"There's Grandma's house!"
"There's the The Champs Elysées!"
"There's Yasgur's Farm!"
And so on.
I've been a fan of Google Earth when it was still Keyhole, and I think what we're doing here is pretty cool too. Having been involved with scenery/terrain design for multiple ACES games studios titles, I'd be really excited to see streamed satellite imagery appear in Flight Sim (although it could apply to just about anything if done right...), but truthfully I think people underestimate the problems the idea presents. To be clear, none of what I'm about to list are unsolvable, but they do present a barrier to implementation. The list below is not comprehensive, just what came off the top of my head:
1. There's not full coverage of the globe yet.
True, you wouldn't need to have *everything* to make it happen, but I can already read the e-mails when it turns out (fill in the blank here of your favorite spot on Earth) isn't in the product... This means that you'd have to have some sort of hybrid between what you do have covered and some sort of generic default. This currently works in Flight Simulator (witness VFR scenery, here too, Megascenery, etc.), with specific locations, but not streaming. The progress on what is available changes daily, and I can say that I'm amazed at what's available now as opposed to even just 2-3 years ago...
2. What is covered is inconsistent in color, quality, and season.
I believe that the joy of flying over highly accurate real world imagery would be offset by the immersion break of flying from one inconsistent area to the next, and that it would happen pretty fast. I think people are way more forgiving of a how Google/MSFT might use imagery for mapping versus how they would view it's use in a game/sim. To get consistency you'd have to have a massive effort of color correction/adjustment, or a freakishly advanced automatic system.
3. No good night imagery exists.
At least that I'm aware of. And when I mean good, I mean same level of detail as day stuff. Which means that you'd have to come up with a good way to fake it. (like Megascenery)
4. All the time information is stamped into the image.
Flightsim, for example, ships with Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, Hard Winter, and Night variations of our landclass textures. We drape these textures over DEM, light them, and render shadows into the terrain. Much aerial/satellite imagery has lighting from when the image was taken already present-- strong lighting too. This makes for great screenshots, but it does mean that you'd lose one of the neatest things about Flight Sim-- we model the march of time: leave your computer running Flight Sim, and you'll see seasons and time of day change. To replicate that with Google Earth Tech, you'd have to increase the amount of imagery by at least 5X, *and* start to track time of day/seasonal change.
5. Autogen tech isn't designed for massive aerial/sat scenery
Right now autogen tech works pretty well for what it was designed for: default scenery and small (100-400 tile) imagery areas. But as many 3rd party imagery people'll tell you, there's not enough "auto" in autogen. :)
There are mechanisms that can be used to generate buildings and the like, but designing and implementing such a system to do what is necessary in Flight Sim is not a small task.(scroll down the page)
6. Streaming, like that used in Google Earth is not a magic bullet approach for imagery display.
Even when all it's doing is displaying imagery, it's easy to get the "blurries" in Google Earth. Tack on a lot of other systems and simulation stuff, and... well... if you think it can get bad in Flight Sim...
Let me reiterate: I think the tech and potential results are very enticing, and the problems above are are solvable in one way or another.
I've linked throughout this post to some great large scale imagery solutions available already for Flight Sim, so you can see the possibilities in action. And I should note: this is something we look at periodically. Jason Dent and I talked a few years ago about what it would take to do aerial imagery for the planet at 8 meters per pixel (Flight Sim currently uses a resolution of approx 4.8 meters per pixel), and we came up with a figure of around a terrabyte (for just one season/time of day, if I remember right). Sounded pretty bluesky in 1999 (when Jason and I first talked about it), but way more doable now. Technology changes pretty rapidly these days, so who knows?
It would be neat to see my house...
