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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.
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.
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.
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. "
...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?
Except that it's not exactly an easter egg. It's under the Tools menu. Verifying that it exists is easy: open up Google Earth, use Help/Check for Updates to make sure you have the latest version, and pull open the Tools menu. There it is.
Also, here are the keyboard controls off Google's website.
Saying that it was "discovered" makes it sound like it was hidden. It wasn't.
Quoting the very page you linked to:
Once you have entered flight simulator mode for the first time, you can re-enter the mode by choosing Tools > Enter Flight Simulator.
So no, it's not in the Tools menu by default, and yes, it's an easter egg.
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.
All programs expand indefinitely until they include a flight simulator. And email.
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.
Zoom to San Francisco airport and try it from there.
It is weird, but it works.
Also, use fn-up and fn-down in place of page up and page down on a powerbook.
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
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,...
Yep, it does work, but you have to hold the keys down for a few moments to trigger the dialogue box.
* Game Over * High Score: 264,846,927 -- Your Score: 14
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.
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
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.
Shit. I just accidently crashed my SR22 into the Google Campus. I hope they don't log these kind of things..
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?
%PROGRAMFILES%\Google\Google Earth\res\flightsim\controller\generic.ini
These others in the same directory seem to be for specific brands of controller:
genius_maxfighter_f16u.ini
speed_link_black_hawk.ini
speed_link_cougar_flightstick.ini
From generic.ini
It looks like:
A0..3 = the four axes
P0 = hat switch
DE = elevators
DA = ailerons
DP_0 = power
DR = rudder
HAngle = head angle
I swapped A2 and A3 and everything was hunky-dory!
Check out the other *.ini files and see the there are also button press and release events that can be programmed:
B0..n = buttons
Proceed at your own peril. And don't be a dummy like me, backup your files first!
If you want to get really adventurous here are the flight characteristics of the available aircraft (these are also plain text files):
%PROGRAMFILES%\Google\Google Earth\res\flightsim\aircraft\*.acf
It's like Christmas!
+0 Meh
I guess I was a little too excited and posted before checking everything out. There are more files in the controller director for various sticks. And the files are pretty well documented. You can also create a custom HUD and keyboard setups. Damn! You can even change the gravity and atmosphere. And apparently you don't have to modify existing configs, you can add new ones and reference them in the flightsim.ini file (where you can also setup addition airports). Haven't tested that part yet. Fun-fun-fun!
+0 Meh
Bah! You can't add new planes without rebuilding the dialog box resource and compiling it into flightsim.dll. Weak, Google. But thanks for making everything else so easy to monkey with.
+0 Meh
You must be using Linux, wherein nothing is supposed to work.
-That's what 'free' implies.A horse can't be sick, you know, even if he wants to.
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.
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.