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A comment on Kugelblitz – Mac-Native Google Earth Alternative. Parent comment

Re:Kugelblitz – Mac-Native Google Earth Alternative by VMG on Friday November 06, 2026 @08:29AM (#50392057)
There is a Netflix miniseries about how two underdog hackers built the first Google Earth precursor in 1994(!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Billion_Dollar_Code

(IIRC the premise was that the underdogs invented something Mipmaps, which I found hard to believe. The core tech was probably already invented by 3d shooters at that time)

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Re:Kugelblitz – Mac-Native Google Earth Alternative by LukaD on Friday November 06, 2026 @09:41AM (#50392875)
It's not the same mipmapping that games use really, but dividing the map data into a quadtree with progressively finer resolutions.

It's more like turning mipmapping into a paging system.

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Re:Kugelblitz – Mac-Native Google Earth Alternative by Dunedan on Sunday November 08, 2026 @08:33AM (#50413202)
Fun fact: The author of Kugelblitz, Tim Pritlove, worked for Art+Com which developed the Google Earth precursor TerraVision you mentioned.
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