i have been obsessed recently with the new cities that are fully rendered in 3D in google earth. everything is rendered, right down to individual trees and insignificant little buildings.
i like to plot a route that follows a freeway from one side of the 3D area to the other, and then tour the route at an altitude of 250 meters (relative to the ground level) and at various speeds. i like 200mph best because that was the cruising speed of the DC3 aircraft, and i imagine cruising over the highway as if i had a DC3.
many cities are rendered, and some of them have more area rendered than others. Rome for example is only rendered to a 15 km radius so it is not a very interesting place for a 3D tour. the largest 3D area that i have found so far is in the US pacific northwest, and i have plotted a stunning 3D route that goes for 119 miles. i watched it the first time at a speed of only 50mph, and of course it took 2 hours and 23 minutes, and i was engrossed for the whole tour. then i watched it again at 200mph, and it felt liberating to cover all that distance again in such a short time. i have a very long attention span for things that many people would consider very boring.
anyway, as much as i am pleased about the new freedom i have to experience almost photo-realistic trips over many cities, i have 3 gripes about it.
1. Sydney is not rendered in 3D ! there are so many tin pot cities that are rendered, and yet sydney is not. brisbane is rendered to about a 40km radius as is adelaide and perth. i want to experience a flight over landscape that i am familiar with in the same way as i can experience the other cities. Sydney at the moment is just a flat bitmap with a few user created 3D buildings that are landmark buildings, and it is not good enough.
2. the maximum disk cache size that google earth will allow is 2 gigs. it annoys me to quite a considerable degree. when i first arrive in a new area, the scenery is not buffered and it is reliant on my internet connection speed as to how fast the scenery is downloaded and rendered to a state of complete crispness.
at first, all one sees is vague polygons, and they continuously are "etched" away (like a super speed sculptor is chiseling out the details (quite mesmerizing to watch in a different way)) until they are fully rendered. when i am stationary, this can take 30 seconds. then i move a few hundred meters forward on the tour and i am back to polygons that evolve similarly in a similar time. i have to inch my way through the tour the first time it is played so that hopefully all the scenery will be fully cached for when i want to fly over it a second time at 500mph. i quite enjoy the "first pass" because it satisfies some primal desire i have to watch formlessness develop into form. but i only want to watch that once.
what i really want to do is to fly over it all at 500 mph with it all being fully rendered and cached and crisp, but i can only go for about 2 miles before the meagre 2 gb cache is filled up. if i go for 3 miles and then back up to the start, it has to render all over again and it is a major frustration. i have terrabytes of potential storage for a cache but google only allows 2 gigs! if there was another way to spell "grrrr" i would spell it that way because the term "grrrr" spelled the way it is is not sufficient.
3. i forget what my 3 gripe is. that is probably the worst gripe of them all. the first 2 gripes robbed me of so much attention, that i forgot what my 3rd and most vitriolic gripe was. maybe that is how it is designed. floor people with the first 2 problems and they will be so punch drunk with disappointment that they will not notice any further shortcomings.
oh yes now i remember what the 3rd gripe is. i searched on google as to why sydney was not yet mapped, and i was not able to get straight to the point because so many "google search suggestions" advocated sites that sing the praises of the 3d mapping stuff, but i eventually found a site that said that 3D sydney is nearly ready to be released on google earth, but then it said that it would only be available on various phones as an "app" (i wrote "apps" in the late 1990's for a company i worked for, but "apps" were a median point between written code files and compiled exe code (both of which i wrote), and they were not platform dependent)). i do not want to go on tours on a ruddy phone. phones are so basic. they have no real fidelity. they have a screen that is at best the size of a postcard. i wonder whether 3D sydney is only being rendered in low resolution and is therefore only acceptable to view on a piddling little phone?
i like to do tours on a pc that drives a 55 inch 1080p hdtv.
oh well.
everyone lives and dies,
and they all have "s**t loads" of desires,
and never the most of them to light will be revealed,
and the reality of them will always be concealed from the greater consciousness of reality.
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it is only when i am finding fault with my usual computorial pursuits that i find time to talk.