Remember the post about Microsoft teaming up with NAVTEQ for Flight Simulator X? The Data Mining blog has discoverd the VFR Photographic Scenery add-on for the same said game. With this pack installed, the player can fly Wales. Or England, as far as Dover to the Scots borders:
From the White Cliffs of Dover to the Scottish border, you can now enjoy unsurpassed detail in this astonishing photographic scenery for Microsoft Flight Simulator X.
Explore the UK, go sight-seeing, rehearse flights, practice VFR navigation techniques (using real aeronautical charts), or simply enjoy spectacular views from your virtual cockpit.
Right down to "every lump and bump", they claim, and the screenshots are pretty sweet:
Hello Wales!
Every time I ever go anywhere majestic (like Wales, or the Nevada Desert), you've got to wonder how people got there in the first place. How much value you'd place on a good horse, if it took you three weeks to go from one village to the next. Imagine.
The idea of an MMO using the real world as a map just blows my mind. Imagine if you were playing in a world most of which you would never, realistically, ever explore? Would that suck, or be amazing? Hurts my head.
My first thought on seeing google maps was that eventually someone would make an MMO based on real world data. That could be amazing.
Eventually someone will build an MMO that not only uses real world data, but overlaps it. Hardcore players will be wandering the streets in home-made armor, looking through "augmented-reality" goggles at castles that occupy the same space as real-word Wal-Marts. To get that "elite item" they'll have to actually travel to France, etc. It's so absurd I can see it actually happening.
Posted by: bob | December 04, 2006 at 20:54
It's a fantastic idea - and with game engines like Torque Advanced supporting enormous landscapes constructed from GIS mapping data, perhaps not too far off. (I'd love to play a survival horror in locations that I know well.)
As for an MMO you could never hope to explore, Eve online's thousands of star systems would take years to fully explore. I have travelled through maybe 500 full-sized solar systems in the year or so I've been playing, and spent more than 5 minutes in about 100.
Posted by: Seb Potter | December 05, 2006 at 13:54
Does that bother you, Seb, or make the game more interesting, the fact that you'll never explore the whole thing?
Posted by: Alice | December 05, 2006 at 16:45
It doesn't bother me in the slightest - in fact I think it's probably one of the most compelling features of the game. I'm more worried about not being to visit every corner of the real world than I am a game.
Posted by: Seb Potter | December 10, 2006 at 16:39