Google Earth Flight Simulator

[Dodger]

So I read this story at the Inquirer:

Google Earth has hidden fright simulator

I downloaded the latest GE and fired it up and hit the Ctrl-Alt-A. Sure enough a nice little popup appears and asks if you want to fly an F16 or an SR22. You choose your aircraft and your departure airfield, and boom... there you are on the runway.

The terrain is a little blury from the ground level. But the terrain isn't flat as I thought it would be. As you fly around, the maps are streaming which is seems to be fairly bandwidth hungry.

Although this is no serious simulator, and may never be, it's an interest concept. One of the issues with current flight simulators is world terrain and the poor quality thereof. Each flight sim has it's own implementation, either licensed or internally developed. Although MS FSX is one of the nicest looking, there's no combat, and it doesn't seem that MS will license their terrain to a combat sim company. What if Google developed their terrain system further and licensed it? This would allow flight sim companies to stop wasting money on terrain development and to focus on flight, weapons modelling, physics etc.

Anyway... check out the GE flight sim... its fun for about 5 minutes.

[Hipshot]

Hey Dodger, I saw this yesterday also,
and had the same thoughts as you......especially the 5 min. part

[Wild.Bill.Kelso]

I saw that on YouTube. It's got to be better than the HistoryChannel's Dogfight Game. What a huge waste of download time that was.

[Dodger]

The Google sim is far from good though. It is an interesting concept though.