Google brings its legacy Earth Pro Flight Simulator to the web, bypassing high 3D tile API costs

In true Google sense I click the link and don't end up in a flight simulator but in a data layer project manager?

@OfficialLoganK

Google got tired of all the vibe coded simulators built on 3d tiles and said - screw it, flight sim on web, free for all - no need to burn api credits. The deeper lore here is that flight sim has long been an easter egg feature exclusive to the legacy earth pro desktop app.

@Das_Filter Hell yeahhh I built http://rtcw.pieter.com and http://q2.pieter.com with it

@alexanderrX_ Yessss I flew once a Cessna last year but wanna go again

@levelsio combat I don't think they'll do, not much purpose, but landing and takeoff would be fun

@levelsio i learned this the hard way this week vibecoding http://courtfinder.merterdir.com

sat images are damn expensive. do you have a better option than mapbox for high res rasters? they don’t even allow you to set a limit. burned a lot of cash when this went viral on reddit because it was free

@levelsio Did you try that Claude 5 fabel shite before they nuked it ??

@levelsio Ah so they bolted a HUD and some viewport slowdowns and called it a simulator?

I agree the most fun part is the social aspect, cosplaying as pilots and dog fighting

@levelsio @OfficialLoganK yeah the UX flow is so weird. You gotta click explore earth then tools the flight simulator lol

Flight simulator had me hooked as a kid then I just lost it cuz they didn’t evolve. It should have honestly become the dominant name for combat sim also including jets and such. They sold themselves short by not making an online multiplayer battle of some sort in this day and age. I’m talking this was fun when computers used to take 5 minutes to boot up kinda days

@levelsio for sure inspired by your flight simulator

nonetheless very cool, we need more fun stuff

@levelsio the $10k bill being the whole moat explains why nobody shipped this until now

@levelsio I would fly about for hours in this. Let me choose a jet or concorde though.

Are you taking flying lessons irl?

@levelsio bro is so obsessed with games rn

@levelsio With some AI ATC and semi realistic places it will be so much fun! Brb ordering a joystick.

@levelsio Or just allow us to build on top of it

@levelsio very impressive work, though

@levelsio @OfficialLoganK yeah same here. Need to click Explore Earth first.

@bilawalsidhu Yes! I used to fly around the legacy Google Earth desktop app so often as a kid

@bilawalsidhu 😀 nice