Google Earth As a Game Engine For Ship Simulation

dinther writes "Yesterday the program Ships was released. Ships is significant because it is the first serious application that uses Google Earth as a game engine. In Ships, you take control of a selection of ships and drive them around the world (if you have that much time). Building games around Google Earth is now viable, thanks to its ever-increasing level of detail. From a technical standpoint, the Google Earth browser plugin has proven to be quite a capable platform to work with. Further tech details about the application are available as well."

Comments

only available on Windows and Mac OS X 10.4+

[Norsefire]

The Google Earth Plugin is currently only available on Windows and Mac OS X 10.4+.

Well, that's the first browser-based game I've tried to play that isn't cross platform.

load on google servers

[mehrotra.akash]

wouldn't this type of game cause an exponential increase of load on Google's servers??

This is actually a big deal

[LS]

Imagine if you could play GTA but across the whole world, dealing with drug cartels in Columbia and making weapons trades with the Russian mafia. Or recreate a WW2 battle. Google earth could become a platform for any game that is based in real world geography.

The API may not be robust enough and the detail may not be comprehensive enough to do this yet, but it seems like it could be done in short time if Google so wished.

The platform could become a general gaming engine as well, where you could select a universe (real world / Star Wars World / J.R.R. Tolkien world, etc) and visit other planets.

I suppose google could call this Google Universe, a MMO engine based in GIS technology, with one of the Universes being managed by google based on real data, and any others being created by 3rd party developers.

The potential is pretty exciting...

LS