Streaming Google Earth imagery as scenery

[Mach3DS]

A long while back there was a post with a video of 2 T-45's flying around Hawaii and it was all Google Earth imagery being streamed live into the sim. Anyone remember this? Is this still possible to do?it was flat out amazing.

[scotth6]

It sounds like Tile Proxy:

http://www.edtruthan.com/tileproxy/tutorial/

https://sourceforge.net/projects/tileproxy/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzH5FPOb6H4

http://www.avsim.com/forum/284-the-tileproxy-project-forum/

http://rele.me.uk/flight-simulation/tileproxy/tileproxy-installation

http://tileproxy.eklablog.com/tileproxy-guide-english-version-a125263210

http://airdailyx.blogspot.com.au/2013/01/tileproxy.html


Cheers,

[xpelekis]

This sounds & looks amazing ! Since the strongest point of FSX, probably is,
the flying over photoreal scenery experience...

Thank's for heads up.

[Mach3DS]

Tile proxy! That's it. Couldn't remember the name of it for the life of me! Thank you! Off to set it up in p3dv3... finally will be able to fly around the NTTR with photorealism. Hopefully the craters will be viewable from the ATS on the west side of A51! Should be fun!

[trucker17]

Thanks. Thats very interesting, Its something i will be looking into more.

[Montie]

Tile proxy! That's it. Couldn't remember the name of it for the life of me! Thank you! Off to set it up in p3dv3... finally will be able to fly around the NTTR with photorealism. Hopefully the craters will be viewable from the ATS on the west side of A51! Should be fun!

Feel free to take screenshots :encouragement:

[BendyFlyer]

May be irrelevant or not, depends. And this is not an argument for or against.

One thing about Tile-Proxy and Google Earth - there is no night time scenery only day time. This is because Google Earth is a nifty program that gives a nicely integrated view but is sourced from a huge database of pictures from all over the world, some public source, some not. Google Earth is not real time imagery so the question then becomes, to what extent was Google Earth an improvement on the FSX stock scenery.

I think the tile proxy program worked ok but there were issues for system load and screen resolutions because of pixel sizes. A good search via the net should help. I think I seriously considered it but decided not to do it because of the night/day issue, in other words Google is just a big data base of pics and is not real time satellite imagery. The other thing is Google earth does not provided down to ground level accuracy in every location because of the limits of the satellite imagery available for that location in other words too high level for low level, in other places it is good down to street level. Once you look at the complexity of Tile Proxy and for me a big issue is internet availability and capacity I figured I would stick with the stock FSX scenery and just add in enhancements. Quite frankly, for most altitudes above 6000 ft you would be pushed to tell the difference after all the mesh for FSX does come from proper satelite data its just textures that are the issue they have to be added in no matter what. I am not sure if Google Earth has mesh data written in for display purposes, I think not, and you need the Mesh data to have a proper 3D view and feel in FSX as a flight simulator. From what I saw of Tile-Proxy and the interface to the Google it was flattened in certain perspectives so just a manipulated image set with no elevation data.

But a few thoughts.

[scotth6]

Another downside to Tile Proxy is the real time downloading of the textures. I can't comment that much on it as I haven't actually tried it, but I have downloaded and created a lot of photoreal scenery which can be produced using a number of different programs. You can use the FSX SDK to create photoreal scenery as long as you can source satellite or aerial imagery, which can also be sourced from a variety of locations on the internet, the USGS Earth Explorer for one.

http://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/

You can also use programs like SBuilderX, FS Earth tiles, Google Satellite Maps Downloader, Universal Maps Downloader, and I'm sure there are more available on the internet. There are also many sources for free pre made PR such as Bluesky Scenery, Avsim etc. I know of fantastic PR scenery available for most of the USA, Italy, Belgium, The Netherlands, and again I'm sure there's more. You should be able to find most of it using google.

I think using pre made PR would offer better performance than actually streaming it real time. In saying that, I have a feeling you can actually save the files that Tile Proxy downloads so you can use it any time offline.

Cheers,