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Google Earth Flight Simulator
insidedesign writes "Blogger Marco has recently discovered that the newest version of Google Earth includes a flight simulator. Though simple in comparison to full-blown simulators, Google Earth's is fun and addictive. To get started, press Ctrl+Alt+A for the initial dialog (on OS X, Command+Option+A). Then choose your plane (F16 or SR22) and initial airport. Joysticks are supported; it has even been reported that force feedback works. The game's controls are sensitive so it takes some getting used to. Here are all the available controls. For a quick overview, check out this YouTube video."
That is freaking AWESOME!
The game.
Or, can Google engine handle the load of being /dotted ? I guess I will wait an hour then try it out since the article just got posted. I will report back ;-)
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
I can just see the U.S. government attacking Google as a "terrorist training ground".
Everyone knows that if it teaches you to fly an airplane, it's an Islam extremist hotbed.
Now the terrorists won't even have to shell out $$ for MS-flight sim...
But at least they won't be able to simulate hitting Cheney's house very well.
Which is of course the first fantasy I'd want to explore with it...
Or ABC, CBS... hell, even PBS will stoop to that level if they need cash...
I'd expect this from Slashdot on April First, or Google even, because so many people would think it is a hoax.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
This is kind of like the Doom "game" hidden in one of the old Microsoft office programs. If I remember right, one version of Excel also had a flight simulator.
I love easter eggs.
I'm surprised that the Govt hasn't banned this, claiming it to be a terrorist cell training tool. Just a matter of time, I guess...
This sig left intentionally blank.
The only airport they list for Chicago is Meigs. The only airport that no longer exists in Chicago.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
when Microsoft embedded an entire FPS into an old version of Excel. It was truly surreal to be working in a "serious" application and be able to open up a secretly-coded real game engine.
Weird with a beard!
-Will the Chill
*this sig intentionally left blank*
Creator of RPerl, Scouter, Juggler, Mormon, Perl Monger, Serial Entrepreneur, Aspiring Astrophysicist, Community Organiz
...with Google Sky?
:D
Start thrusters, take off, aim nose towards Andromeda, sit back and wait for two million years, find an airport, land.
Sweet!
Just tried a flight, shows hills and everything. Way more than I expected from an easter egg. Kudos to the guy who dreamed this up.
Who is this Jimmy character, and why was he cracking corn in the first place?
Flying close to the ground is pretty crappy anyway. Apparently there are 1500 foot rolling hills in central Arkansas. But flying from the whole-earth view in space down to little houses is awesome.
It would be nice if we could get out of the airplane and visit people's virtual homes. I got tons of cool stuff to show my virtual guests, I don't know about you guys. Another interesting way to meet people and establish relationships, what can I say?
Insinct is stronger than Upbringing - Irish Proverb
It handled the load just fine when I updated. Now, I know at least one person that I'm reluctant to tell about this, because he's already adicted to GE. We've talked about the possibility of them putting a flight sim in there before--it seemed like a natural idea, since we had both done really lame "flights" just with the momentum of the existing controls.
FWIW, the F-16 is actually quite forgiving. You just have to gain altitude. I managed to get it up to 50000 ft. I think they cripped the thing, because it was struggling to do 300 at 50,000 ft. I want to see the SR-71 and/or some fantasy craft that can fly into space added at some point. Oh... and yes, an autopilot would be nice. Once you get away from level flight, it's quite difficult to zero out the shimmy, and so far all my flights have ended by spinning into the ground. I managed to take the F16 from SFO to Lake Tahoe, and plant it into the Nevada desert. If I had not tried to turn around, it probably would have circumnavigated in level flight. Oh crap, but as I type this the screen is wobbling. That's just wrong. I need to step away.
Still not sure if I should tell my GE-addict friend about this.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Meigs the long time default airport in M$ flight sim is in hear.
All programs expand indefinitely until they include a flight simulator. And email.
Hymm, I just installed the new version on my mac, did the Command+option+A, and its not working!
Oh no! They are completed their scrambler.
Team 3 to position gamma!
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
I'm gonna need a spec.
But I for one am going to be shitting my pants when they update the ground textures to account for the bombing missions I flew in the flight simulator. I will be shitting my pants once again when I leave my house and notice the houses I targeted in my neighborhood are no longer there.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I tried it out for a couple hours and I think it is pretty cool overall. It seems like a natural extension of Google Earth and I enjoyed flying over a couple familiar sites. I think it is a very good start, and I hope they continue working on it by adding more views and features! If you have it, definitely give it a go!
Bill Gates is probably going to be real pissed if this starts eating into his M$ Flight Sim profits, especially if (a) this remains free and (b) Google expands it to include more aircraft and options.
On another note, I wonder if they could make this a network thing, so perhaps we could have dog fights with other users in the air? But the feds would probably put a stop to that, since that would also require Google to install live missiles and bombs in the simulator, allowing people to start bombing various structures in google earth,...
after you press ctl+sht+a it appears perpetually under the tool menu. i wonder if its a feature they planned on implementing in a later release.
I have an engineering degree (two, in fact) and I never call myself an engineer. I usually say I "write software".
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Thanks to everyone at google, this is so amazing.
THIS
THIS is the flight sim i have wanted to fly all my life!
The More Knowledge you have the Luckier you Get- J.R. Ewing
Quickie: IAS or Indicated Airspeed is a flight dynamic that measures the unidirectional force of air along an aircraft's angle of attack and presents this data as a speed; it is measured with a "pitot tube," a metal tube on the wing or nose of a plane that collects air and measures the amount of force being applied down the tube. At standard temp and pressure, with no wind, and with the aircraft's angle of attack parallel to the surface, this number will theoretically give you the speed at which you are traveling along the ground. As ambient pressure goes down (say with altitude), IAS for a given ground speed goes down; as wind picks up, depending on the wind's bearing to the aircraft's orientation, IAS can go up or down (A plane flying a 100 kts headwind and 100 kts IAS will, all other things being equal, in fact have a ground speed of zero). As angle of attack increases, ground speed goes down. You might be flying at Mach 2, but if you're pointed straight up, your ground speed will be zero.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
want something interesting? go to the grand canyon and try it out!
I'm a private pilot, and the other simulators disappoint. They are good for practicing Instrument procedure, and to a certain extent, airplane maneuvers, but for just plane fun (pun intended) they are weak.
Most of the joy of flying General Aviation (small) planes is the view - nothing like it anywhere else, including that commercial jet. (which rockets up to 45,000 feet in 10 minutes where you can't see jack) Flight simulators have typically given depictions of the landscape - patterns that are rough analogies of what you'd actually find out the window.
But this is the real McCoy! Resolution is still weak, and the plane handling characteristics are lousy, but when I'm flying 5,500 VFR over the East Bay, it actually IS the East Bay. I noticed that once you've started the Easter Egg, you can re-launch from any view, which let me spin a few circles above local Oroville, CA.
I recognized everything and had no trouble finding the local airport, and successfully landed the very first try in the SR-22. Since I've never flown an SR22, I had to stall it first in the air to figure out what my approach speed should be - about 70 knots seemed about right.
Really, if they put some spit and polish on this, it could give FS X a real run for its money - for just plane fun, it already rivals FS X!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Actually I think all this talk of aiding terrorisim is arse backwards since flight sims are everywhere anyway. I expected the plane to bounce off the ground and just be arcade style at first, but it actually crashes and then places you far enough away from where you crashed to do a rerun of navigation... to your 'target'. So since you have to be connected the whole time to use it properly won't this just tip off the people at google HQ that somethings up if say people in certain locales start crashing into the Pentagon a bit too much all of a sudden?
I just wish there was a way i could pre-cache a certain area at the highest detail level.
:)
As it is now, it only starts to download when you are already in an area which means
that you are always seeing sub optimal detail levels when you fly into new areas.
For Google it should be easy to make a simple position prediction algorithem (including z) to prioritize
map content area and detail level download. Especially in a flight sim it should be fairly easy to predict
near future positions with a relative high degree of certainty.
Oh well, i was still having more fun playing this then i was playing MS FlighSim X...
Performance probably had a lot do to with that, but also the fact that high res.
aerial pictures for everything is simply better then crappy generated (i should say composited)
detail textures for most everything.
Of course this is this and MS Fligh Sim is something totally different in terms of scope and realism.
Nevertheless, this is free, fun, quick and simple and for me that simply wins
Well, I'll imagine US will monitor where people virtually fly. Do not train white house assaults or CIA will be knocking on your door!
There's no way Will Smith actually flew through there.
Also, GP, I'll bet you have elevation exaggeration set to 3.
Where the earth is really bumpy, i.e., mountain ranges it looks great. So when you take of from Kathmandu (the default), you can head for the big Himalayas and the definition is excellent. The problem is that the 3D buildings aren't rendered in flight sim mode, as far as I can see.
See my journal, I write things there
I've been playing Google earth with a space mouse for ages.
It's 10000% more fun than the normal mouse controls.
No sig today...
Angle of Attack is defined as the angle between the direction of the airflow wind and the wing, and has by definition little to do with the ground speed or the wind direction.
You wouldn't believe how hard it is to escape earth's gravity... You can try it with X-Plane, http://www.x-plane.com/
--
The fact that there's no air in space might be a problem too.
Shit. I just accidently crashed my SR22 into the Google Campus. I hope they don't log these kind of things..
Uh I think that was the point.
I don't know if it's hard to control this simulator or if it's realistic, but I wish it was more like LHX. in fact, a hybrid of LHX Attack Chopper with Google Maps would kick ass.
Just downloaded it to try it out and nothing happens when I press the keys.
I got version "4.2.0181.2634 (beta)"
What's up?
What I would like to see isthis bieng combined with a flight sim like X-plane or Flightgear. It would definately make for some nice flying plus you get a load of extras in aircraft.
I used to contract for Jeppesen. They are in increasing danger of losing their monopoly from a number of other companies and are aware of it. At this point, if Google wanted, they could improve the sim and the map interface and develop the software to load on laptops and ultimately to on-board equipment (though expensive to get the FAA certs for it). The important thing is to win over the pilots, and get them to LOVE the interface. Jepp Maps RULED the world for decades. But the reason is that pilots were taught the interface symbols and the idea of jumping to the fed's maps is difficult. Since most pilots today use computers (and ALL pilots that I know use google), Google could take this away.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I've never wanted to die so much after listening to the narrative. Talk about taking a long time to explain nothing.
"Us computer people" and did you really need to read out the URLs?
The key combo to enable the flightsim is reported to vary, I had to press Ctrl+WinKey+A to enable it (Kubuntu).
.googleearth/Registry/google/googleearthplus/User/ flightsim/isenabled manually from 0 to 1 and the flightsim should appear in the tools menu.
In case you're having difficulties, try changing the value in the file
I wonder if can read and follow a KML file, that would be soooo freakin cool. Kudos gor the google dude who heard our cry for a flightsim into GE.
Within seconds this easter egg had consumed more than a gig of available ram then locked up. Not what I would call "freaking awesome".
The one thing that I really like about Google Earth's Flight Sim is the fact that it's using real world photos for it's terrain. Plus the 3D buildings makes flying a lot more realistic. As much as I love X-Plane, the fact that it uses generic building models for most major cities and a lot of the texture data (at least in the Cleveland area) is tiled and looks nothing like the actual area I'm flying around makes for a less than realistic experience. (Granted, I'm sure that Microsoft Flight simulator looks fantastic and has really realistic real world texture data, but get back to me when Microsoft ports Flight Simulator to Linux or OS X.)
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs. We have a protractor."
When Google's map webpages are speedy and interactive enough to offer a flight simulator, with even the most rudimentary features, Google will finally have arrived at a "Web platform" that competes with desktop platforms. And when all its functions are available as an API (including downloadable scripts and objects) for anyone to bundle, they'll actually have the beginnings of a "Web OS".
Of course the test is whether it can run games like a flight sim. But as a truly native network platform, the games should be even more interesting, whether P2P, client/server, or whether we can't even tell the difference.
--
make install -not war
Very nice, but their flight sim is very basic, I think they should deal with someone who's done good in the flight sim business. My first thought is that guy who made X-Plane, I think they should hire some of his services to make Google Earth Flightsim a fully fledged flightsim that would compete with MS's flightsims
You just got troll'd!
You right, I was sleepy last night ;)
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
...get back to me when it's not a 15 gigabyte installation. Hot dang is that beautiful though.
Yeah, and the screen only refreshes every 2 seconds.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
It may depend on your window manager. On Fluxbox I just used Ctrl+Alt+A to get into it. One thing for sure though, my crappy joystick works better with X-Plane which happens to run beautifully on linux as well.
For some time now I had been hoping the Flightgear community would plug into something like Google Earth. Now it seems the opposite has taken place but I wonder how their flight models compare?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
While that would be sweet, they will need to have some sort of licenses to use real cars in the game, ala Gran Tourismo and the like.
:)
Would be sweet to have a virtual drive round my own town.
But would it be used by nefarious people to plan getaway's from crimes? Or for the police to practice co-ordinating pursuits?
Interesting times
See my art -> http://herbevore.deviantart.com
this has been into GoogleEarth since day 1. and yes flying the Grand Canyon is fucking amazing...
I don't feel like it...
As a user of all three major OSes, I would argue that it would do Windows and Linux users a lot of good to be a bit more critical. Looking at the apps available, there's a reason Mac apps are generally more polished: Mac users complain about stuff like that and will ignore (and thus eventually kill) crappy apps.
Please, people, learn something from Mac users. Don't accept crap just because it's free.
Now, can anyone tell me how to fly a plane?
"Start thrusters, take off, aim nose towards Andromeda, sit back and wait for two million years, find an airport, land."
You forgot something...
Profit!
Fundamentalism is a crime against humanity
English US keyboard layout is the key, if you try eabling the shortcuts with other english keyboard layouts it fails