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Google Opens Maps To Bring the Real World Into Games (engadget.com)

Posted by msmash on from the game-changer dept.

Video games may soon look a lot more like the real world. If you've enjoyed the thrill of driving through GTA V and spying out Los Angeles landmarks, then that's a sentiment you're probably going to start feeling a lot more often while you play video games. From a report: The search firm is both opening its Maps platform's real-time data and offering new software toolkits that will help developers build games based on that data. The software includes both a kit to translate map info to the Unity game engine as well as another to help make games using that location data. The combination turns buildings and other landmarks into customizable 3D objects, and lets you manipulate those objects to fit your game world. It can replace every real hotel into an adventurer's inn, for instance, or add arbitrary points of interest for the sake of checkpoints.

5 of 49 comments (clear)

  1. Great... by ausekilis · · Score: 2

    Now our youth have even less incentive to actually get outside and do something.

    "Hey, you wanna go check out that park downtown?"

      "Nah, I already ran through it in Super Downtown Los Angeles, Zombie Edition"

  2. Great for flight simulators! by caseih · · Score: 2

    There used to be a scenery generator for X-plane that would download Google Maps tiles for ground scenery. But it was always against Google's terms of service before. Now it could be done legitimately. And if they opened up the 3D building data too, that would be great for scenery generation as well. Looking forward to it! Especially in VR... brings a whole new dimension to flight simulation (pun intended, although it is pretty amazing), especially with real scenery. The only problem with today's VR systems is it's too low res to really read the instrument panels very well.

  3. Maybe Sim City Can Make a Comeback by danbert8 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It would be awesome if you could import real cities into a Sim City type game and improve and expand them.

    Ahh who am I kidding? EA sucks and would ruin any chance of it being a decent game...

    --
    Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
    1. Re:Maybe Sim City Can Make a Comeback by Oswald+McWeany · · Score: 2

      It would be awesome if you could import real cities into a Sim City type game and improve and expand them.

      Ahh who am I kidding? EA sucks and would ruin any chance of it being a decent game...

      Sim City isn't the best city simulation type game anyway and hasn't been for a long time. "Cities Skylines" is the most popular and best in that genre. I don't think you can import cities from Google Maps- but you can import topographies into Skylines- and have a realistic topography to build your city on. So your city could be built on the realistic topography of London, New York, Oslo, or wherever.

      --
      "That's the way to do it" - Punch
  4. Until when? by technosaurus · · Score: 2

    I once wrote a tool to partially automate localization of open source software using Google translate. ...Until Alphabet/Google changed their policies. Its not an isolated case either, more of their previously public apis are dead than alive and its really arbitrary (Google real estate could have been a cash cow) Google lost developer trust in this area years ago and wont gain it back without a huge public policy change. If you are going to use them, have a backup plan.