Re:Google Flight Simulator
by boshalfoshal on Monday June 15, 2026 @11:36AM
(#48542868)
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.
Re:Google Flight Simulator
by burnt_toast on Monday June 15, 2026 @12:08PM
(#48543351)
Can confirm, we used to play it in the high school I went to around 2012 because it was one of the few games that the network filters didn't block.
Google Earth pro is still available for download with the flight simulator, which is much better than the new web version. I played around with it last night after being disappointed with the web version.
Re:Google Flight Simulator
by cactusplant7374 on Monday June 15, 2026 @11:05AM
(#48542368)
A lot of vibe coders and software engineers have created similar projects using the Google Maps 3D tiles API.
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.)