Unfortunately, whoever did the controls for this doesn't understand how airplanes work.
Google Flight Simulator
11–20 of 52 posts
Re: Google Flight Simulator
#12Am I tripping or was this in Google Earth ages ago? I distinctly remember flying SU-27 on Google Earth map like a decade or more ago.
I think it was also a feature of the commercial version of Keyhole, which IIRC, Google bought and turned into Google Earth.
The place where I worked had a Keyhole machine for pulling up satellite maps and doing animations back when this was considered borderline science fiction.
Re: Google Flight Simulator
#13I wonder why Google doesn’t bother competing with Microsoft in the flight simulation niche. All that Google Maps data would be pretty cool to use for that purpose, but instead we’ve got only this toy feature inside Google Earth.
Re: Google Flight Simulator
#14This is fun, and I wouldn't be surprised if someone at Google did something like this a couple decades ago, as a 20% Project.
Outside of Google, around that time, I used Google Earth for a 3D visualization tool for real flight data recorders, integrated into a larger browser-based system.
(Stack: Google Earth Plugin did the heaviest lifting, especially before there were better ways to render 3D in a browser window. The frontend used JS, HTML for instruments, and some kludges to work around some limitations of off-label use of Plugin. The backend was in Scheme, and retrieving and serving up cached data for this was one of the simplest of the things that the Scheme did in that large system. Aircraft 3D models were off-the-shelf, which I tweaked lightly in (IIRC) Google SketchUp.)
Re: Google Flight Simulator
#15I wonder why Google doesn’t bother competing with Microsoft in the flight simulation niche. All that Google Maps data would be pretty cool to use for that purpose, but instead we’ve got only this toy feature inside Google Earth.
> I wonder why Google doesn’t bother competing with Microsoft in the flight simulation niche.
Because the competition is already fierce. There's MS Flight Simulator and X-Plane on the commercial side, Flightgear on the open source side and geo-fs.com on the free-to-play side.
There is not much Google can actually gain from making their own flight simulator.
Re: Google Flight Simulator
#16I wonder why Google doesn’t bother competing with Microsoft in the flight simulation niche. All that Google Maps data would be pretty cool to use for that purpose, but instead we’ve got only this toy feature inside Google Earth.
High development and/or maintenance cost, low profit.
Re: Google Flight Simulator
#17This is fun, and I wouldn't be surprised if someone at Google did something like this a couple decades ago, as a 20% Project. Outside of Google, around that time, I used Google Earth for a 3D visualization tool for real flight data recorders, integrated into a larger browser-based system. (Stack: Google Earth Plugin did the heaviest lifting, especially before there were better ways to render 3D in a browser window. T…
A lot of vibe coders and software engineers have created similar projects using the Google Maps 3D tiles API.
Re: Google Flight Simulator
#18Cool, I'll have to try it in the next 18 months before they turn it down.
Re: Google Flight Simulator
#19Unfortunately, whoever did the controls for this doesn't understand how airplanes work.
So much for hiring “smart creatives” and supporting their work I guess…source: Introduction section of 2014’s “How Google Works” (I returned it to the library after that, I’m not going to hate-read stuff even if it would give me some insight into Eric Schmidt’s career)
Re: Google Flight Simulator
#20This is fun, and I wouldn't be surprised if someone at Google did something like this a couple decades ago, as a 20% Project. Outside of Google, around that time, I used Google Earth for a 3D visualization tool for real flight data recorders, integrated into a larger browser-based system. (Stack: Google Earth Plugin did the heaviest lifting, especially before there were better ways to render 3D in a browser window. T…
This _was_ done a couple of decades ago, it was available on the downloadable version of google earth (when it existed). I remember playing around with it in 2012.