nokia's new terrorism planning guide

[Rick_D]

http://maps3d.svc.nokia.com/webgl/

this is fucking amazing

[Mazy]

Agreed, very awesome. GIEV RTS mod plzkthx

[D3ads]

Man that is incredible! Prague and London look amazing... I hope they add more locations in time, like Moscow and St Petersburg..

How is this done? I was thinking parallax mapping on aerial photos but I'm not sure...

[Thrik]

Man that is incredible! Prague and London look amazing... I hope they add more locations in time, like Moscow and St Petersburg..

How is this done? I was thinking parallax mapping on aerial photos but I'm not sure...

If you mean bump mapping, that's what I think too. The shots must be from aerial fly-overs to get the sides of buildings, and presumably they couple that with height data which is acquired... somehow. Sure beats Google's approach of getting people to actually model 3D buildings (I think there's like five that're 3D in Nottingham as a result).

[Sentura]

i don't know if it's just me, but every texture is really low resolution?

[Thrik]

You're probably seeing it right. It's not exactly Battlefield 3, but it's a big step up from the kind of maps we've been using for years — I think higher-resolution photos would make it look a lot better, perhaps it's a performance thing. Whether it's actually more useful than a combination of traditional maps and Google's street view efforts I don't know, but it's certainly a nice toy.

The aerial photos thing kind of falls apart now that I think about it when it comes to large cities, though. Aerial photos typically capture stuff at angles (check out Bing maps), so how do they get the sides of skyscrapers in New York when there's going to be loads of other skyscrapers blocking the plane's view?

[Thrik]

It's probably worth pointing out that Bing maps has also provided pretty much exactly this same thing for quite a while now (it created a buzz last year), however you do need a browser plug-in to use it whereas this one uses the fancy new WebGL approach to things — which is kind of awesome in itself if you follow that industry. It wouldn't surprise me if Nokia is using Bing's images to produce this as even Google hasn't got all the aerial maps that Bing has.

[sarge mat]

Reminds me a bit of that game real time worlds where making.

[dux]

My connection is pants for this, takes ages to load the stuff when I zoom all the way in

[Sentura]

i don't even get those textures, all i get is basically a 2d terrain texture over some bad uv mapping

[Minos]

Now make a Sim City game with those graphics!

[Seldoon182]

I think there is full-time artist working on it right ?

[Tisky]

Minos is right, Sim City gone woootatoota

[General Vivi]

very cool! Love how they have Boston on there!

[2d-chris]

It's defo about time for another sim city but a proper one not some social games crap