Hi, I had an idea today How about using Google maps to stream terrain and an actual map overlay on the ground. I'm just thinking that if you can do that, we can do an actual road trip as far as we want to go. I was thinking of something like this http://framesynthesis.com/drivingsimulator/maps/ Where the ground is all the same so you don't have to do anything to change for materials. Just use one material. And just use the map overlay and not the satellite overlay.
You will end up with a flat (or semi-flat) terrain with no object, but just an image. Realism below zero. (imported from here) Driving on cars/buildings/water/everything.
I wonder if it's possible to do a section of google earth terrain, like a chunk of a city to drive through. Even if it's pre-made and not streaming - - - Updated - - - I found this http://designerhacks.com/sketchupgooglemaps/
I don't know if buildings can be brought over or not but you can import sections of Google Earth into SketchUp and set it to have depth like it would on the map. You don't have to make it yourself either, SketchUp has a built in toggle, but I also don't know how accurate it is, I haven't messed with that feature for a while.
It's not technically modeled, but uses some form of aerial laser scan. Also, while it is pretty powerful (and yes, pretty), it still can't capture smaller details, and would suffer greatly being used in a ground-level game. It's also slightly inaccurate. Yup, that's the only reason why I have Sketchup. However more inconvenient, the same can be accomplished via imported DEM data, which is better for larger areas. I would love to see some union of Beam physics and Outerra, which seems like the perfect combination of accurate and visually compelling. However, while there allegedly were talks between the two dev teams, it was ultimately determined it probably won't happen.
If all you were saying were possible than the one material would have to cover a globe's worth of textures in decent quality.. that would be the most oversized texture in the known universe.. imagine the size, or resolution, no 2048x2048 could cover such a distance Try bigger than 65536x65536
ID Tech 5 engine and its virtual texturing technology (improved variant of megatexturing which was developed by full time fucking legend John Carmack, first used in the mediocre game Enemy Territory: Quake Wars). Textures can measure up to 128000 by 128000, even on ps3 and Xbox 360. Scratch that really as it's the cause for texture pop in on those games. Although rage didn't suffer too bad on my desktop, wolfenstein did on laptop though.
That website used to have that same thing but you could drive on Google Earth in 3D. Unfortunately the Google Earth plugin was deprecated.
