Goggles : a flash flight sim

[isoma]

Hello, Sorry to be pimping my own website in my first post, I realise its really bad nettiquette, but I figure most of you fellow flash coders and designers may be interested in my game:

http://www.isoma.net/games/goggles.html

It's a flash flight sim that loads in images from googlemaps. controls are arrow keys, spacebar to fire and a and z to chane speed. Its still work in progress but a few people have picked up on the link so I'm making it a bit public in an attempt to get a job!

Thanks for looking at it, I'd be happy to answer any technical questions about it (within reason! no 'give me your sourfce code' pm's please )

[grimreaper1377]

Not asking for code, but assumed you used XML, right?

[mentuat]

nice idea!

fixing the shadow so it appears smaller and further away from the plane according to it's altitude would dramatically improve the perception of height.

If you could combine this with up to date weather reports for the relevent map areas you could have real cloud cover/rain/snow etc. and alter the matrix value of the bitmaps to lighten or darken them accordingly!

[isoma]

nice idea!

fixing the shadow so it appears smaller and further away from the plane according to it's altitude would dramatically improve the perception of height.

If you could combine this with up to date weather reports for the relevent map areas you could have real cloud cover/rain/snow etc. and alter the matrix value of the bitmaps to lighten or darken them accordingly!

um. the shadow does change with height it doesn't move too much, but does a bit (12 pixels in all) and gets more blurry and less opaque.

I'd considered doing a day and night thing on the maps based on the time in that part of the world but then thought 'meh'

[grimreaper1377]

You could just change the tint and make it darker....

[mentuat]

aye, I was thinking more like this:



to make it easier to know when you are about to hit the ground

[Captain_404]

I tried and tried to reach the edge of the map to no avail...does it just load more of it forever and ever?

could you make it so that you could choose anywhere to go, rather than a few preset options? I have a strange urge to fly over area 51...

[cadin]

This is dope. I'm totally excited to see the final version.
I agree with the captain--I'd love to be able to set the starting position, and/or have a zoomed out view somehow so it would be easier to get your bearings. I had a hell of a time getting my bearings over New York (although I did finally locate my house and crash into it!)

[ozmic66]

wheeeeee I can see my house from here

This is really cool! I like the way the plane behaves too
someone mentioned live updates, and if you want, I know you can use yahoo's live traffic report to plot locations of traffic warnings on the map. you can also use their geocoding service to convert addresses to long/lat

[mr_malee]

thats really nice. Cool idea, would love to see a dogfight over a famous city.

[hooligan2001]

Very very cool, runs very well too. Great work.

[grimreaper1377]

Suggestion:

I don't know if google does it by hieght or has any height markers whatsoever, but it would be cool if you crash into things according to your height. Like you crash into skyscrapers in NY and stuff like that.

[Gloo pot]

I saw this a day or so ago, flash culture have a link to it. It made me think of the red bull air races , but in famouse cities. Also has a gta feal to it, but in a plane and with no bounderies.

Can i ask, would it be possable to fly from say newyork to australia? I want to go flying over my home

[rasterwerks]

Very cool, great idea and slick implementation, congrats! I'm amazed how well it runs, Google's servers manage to keep up nicely (I'm seeing an almost continuous 60KB/s datastream). I like how you scale both the ground and the plane when changing elevation. Is the plane pre-rendered or drawn with your own 3D engine? Couple of requests: it would be nice to be able to fly higher so you can see more of the surrounding area, and please add Los Angeles (if it isn't too much trouble).

[mr_malee]

it really does need a bigger window, but this would off course need more images to load and migth look a little shizen.

Is there a limit to how many images can be loaded at one time?

never used the google maps thing. If there isn't you could load a large area around the plane at start, load in the image data into a bitmap, record the image position, copy the pixels from that bitmap when needed.

So basically a bitmap is always being filled with new images and is grabbing images from the data

[hooligan2001]

You should add in a compas. For directions

EDIT: Just thought about how stupid that would be considering how the map scrolls anyway. Ignore this whole post

[ChaseNYC]

i just like that i crashed into my house... very cool idea though... not much else to say...

[isoma]

added San Fran, so you can fly to LA from there. Will add LA in a bit.

Am trying not to kill googles servers, as they've been really cool about all this. so not adding more panes in.

Sydney's in there too now.

theres no way to detect height on map items without hand coding them, and I so can't be bothered.

Plane is pre rendered in a 3d app. I have a flash 3d wireframe renderer (on my portfolio) but CPUs aren't up to solid face on the fly shaded rendering. So its flick book stylee for now.

Some twat's nicked the games code, recompiled it and put it on his site. at least he left a link to me in there, but still, twat, obviously.

Would love to make an electroserver 2 player one, or sequential levels in various capital cities of the world, but just dont have time.

solved the memory issue, you can fly as long as you like now.

increased the shadow dsiplacement too, it should get smaller as the plane gets higher along with the ground, but its not going to be elegant to do that.

[Squize]

"but still, twat, obviously"

Mate, I've warmed to you instantly.

Is a very nice thing you've made too, pimped that around the office as soon as I saw it yesterday, good work.

Squize.

[lesli_felix]

Someone emailed this around work this morning, great stuff!

I spent a good half hour trying to find our offices in farringdon so I could shoot them up.

I need to get out more.