The Google Earth blog reports:
Over the years we've seen quite a few games that use Google Earth as their platform including gems such as Ships, Google Earth War and the GE Flight Simulator. Now a new game is in development and it appears to have a ton of potential: Geoception.
Here's a brief description of the game from the developer, Satyen Sarhad:
In a nutshell, you command and control a fleet of combat drones to provide local and regional security, eventually taking over the whole world. My aim is to make the game readily skinnable so arbitrary models from 3DWarehouse can be dropped into the game to replace the existing model assets. I have great hopes for this gaming platform, although (as you know), there are technical issues with achieving a decent frame rate in newer, out-of-process-plugin browsers. Nonetheless, I stuck with development and put together a limited game demo (that plays best in Firefox 3.6) that lets you fly UAVs around any city in the world, and shoot at various targets to earn XP:They've produced a trailer for the game, and it looks quite impressive:
Comments
What I think is novel about this is using the Google Earth API to create a game engine. That's the value I see provided and worth emphasis. The distinction between manned and unmanned vehicles being sort of artificial in a virtual environment.
Any way this can be ported for MultiTheftAuto?
I dont't like it.
This is where we really realize that the planet is not that big and we are really living close together.
Zooming in and out to follow "criminals" on real geo data maps it's the next think the Army will have has in their battle tool box.
I still prefer my games to be set in an "alternate realm", earth is boring! :) hehe