Why don't Flight Simulators license terrain/buildings from Google?

"facw" (facw) 04/06/2018 at 10:15 • Filed to: Flight Simulators, Planelopnik, computerlopnik

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I’ve been looking at flight simulator stuff recently, and honestly I’m a bit taken aback by how low quality the scenery is compared to Google Earth. X-Plane even features a comparison, which I guess is supposed to make you think “wow that’s getting pretty close to how it really is”, but I can’t help but think “wow why don’t they just use what Google uses”:

X-Plane 11:

Google Earth:

It seems like it should be possible to license the data sets used in Google Earth to make it work. The flight sim community might be small, but presumably that means lower licensing costs as well. The only issue might be if they are too small for anyone to even want to bother dealing with.

The data might need to be streamed (as Google Earth does), either for licensing reasons, or simply because of the huge size of the data set, but I really doubt there are many people flying on 56k modem connections these days, so it seems like that part should not be a huge issue.

Seems like maybe the biggest problem is that for an existing player, you’d be throwing away your existing scenery system (for the most part, you might want to keep it for doing more detailed airports and the like) and having to do something new, which could be a huge bit of worth for a relatively low selling product.

Anyway, maybe it’s not really realistic, but I’m clearly just annoyed that the Google Earth flight simulator, while obviously unable to match the competition in planes or physics modeling is vastly superior in terms of terrain and scenery. I’m also annoyed that it doesn’t recognize my flight stick...

Noah - Now with more boost. > facw 04/06/2018 at 10:27

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I think the answer is a boring business reality: flight sims are *very* niche so scraping together the cash to pay Google of all people for a ton of their assets? That sounds difficult, especially considering that not only are you working with a small demographic:“PC gamers who love planes and want to buy a joystick”

red014 > facw 04/06/2018 at 10:39

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EDIT: AAAAND I just read your whole post. Never mind, you already knew this. Ignore below...

I don’t use flight simulators personally, so I can’t speak to what level of garbage it may or may not be, but Google Earth has one built-in. I can’t imagine they’d spend a ton of time making it wonderful and then hiding it though, so it’s probably rather basic compared to most.

https://support.google.com/earth/answer/148089?hl=en

Mercedes Streeter > facw 04/06/2018 at 10:39

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Sims like XP-11, P3D, FSX, and the like are more about the realism of the flight model and dynamics rather than the scenery. They’ll get the scenery and terrain passable as the location they say it is and divert most programming resources to making the flight as real as possible. These sims already have a massive install size and hardware reqs.

For people concerned with how accurate cities and terrain looks, both freeware and payware fill in those gaps for now.

Ash78, voting early and often > facw 04/06/2018 at 10:56

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Give me Meigs Field and a wireframe Sears Tower and I’m happy.

facw > Ash78, voting early and often 04/06/2018 at 11:10

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I did think about making this the lead image:

I’ve played earlier versions than that, but I’m pretty sure 5 was the first one I owned (also whoever took that screenshot had the detail settings pretty low, I recall a bunch more buildings, though still certainly not a city full of them):

ThePlasticOne - no diggities expressed nor implied. > facw 04/06/2018 at 12:05

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I don’t think the developers would like it much if someone used their game to plan another 9/11...

facw > ThePlasticOne - no diggities expressed nor implied. 04/06/2018 at 12:13

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Which has nothing to do with this? Even the dated, fairly generic scenery included in these products would be more than sufficient for that.

Jake - Has Bad Luck So You Don't Have To > Ash78, voting early and often 04/06/2018 at 23:24

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yesssss FS4 was my jam!