Interesting, if you look at Pyongyang (North Korea), it has a bunch of labels that don't show if you use their regular maps. They're quite detailed too, it shows "Statue 2 of 'The Newly Freed Proletariat Thanks To The Grat Leader Kim Il-Sung'", schools and such. They must have hidden map data they don't show normally that leaked into this map. http://g.co/maps/tg9jy
It's a pretty impressive map for an April Fool's joke. Particularly like the 2d rendered buildings for landmarks like the Eiffel Tower, Sutro Tower in SF, etc. Presumably somewhat inspired by Brett Camper's 2010 project 8bitNYC. http://8bitcity.com/map?New%20York
Even though I think this is great, it still kind of annoys me that they keep calling it a NES when they're clearly using a Famicom. I suspect that's actually going to confuse a lot of people.
It looks like the video was made by Japanese, but they probably used the name "NES" because it's more familiar to English-speaking audiences who're likely to make up the majority of video views.
That's pretty great. I've wanted for a while to find a way to layer image effects onto Google Street View, to be able to move around the world in a sort of alternate processed reality. But afaik, there's no straightfoward way to add a filter like that unless you're Google. There's an image API, but the resolution is only 640x480. There's an undocumented image API with higher-res images, but you'll get banned if you make more than occasional usage of it. Perhaps it'd be possible to do it via a browser extension that renders the effects locally?
[edit: Just thought of one possible route. There's a WebGL beta for Street View; perhaps you could add effects by injecting some WebGL shader code, given appropriate local security permissions?]
So far I've been just experimenting with grabbing a few hundred images from the undocumented API and applying effects locally. This is the result of one experiment (hit [reload] at the top/right for new images): http://www.kmjn.org/projects/cyanocph/
Dragon Warrior! Man, I loved that game, despite its flaws. The gameplay was really slow-paced, and the random battles were kind of annoying. But it was unabashedly itself, and I guess I fell in love with the world and the good ol’ swords-and-sorcery style. It helps that the NES is just an excellent system—mine’s still in perfect working order.
Yeah the music in the video really brought me back for a second. I was just thinking about my old NES wondering where in my parents house it could be and if I could play earthbound.
8bit city with map tiles have been for awhile now using Openstreetmap as the source. An example that has been arou d for years is this http://8bitcity.com/map?New%20York
a possible word of warning: I disabled MapsGL to see it. In the past there has always been a button to get back into GL mode, but I can't find it anymore so I am now stuck in Flash.
My first instinct was to look under the hood for some sprites I could use for a map based game. No luck, all the cool building/characters seem embedded in the the actual tiles.
Is there any way Google would try to make an actual game out of this? I know there are other successful online 8-bit-ish RPGs that use the Google Maps as a base...
If you try to replicate the route from Los Angeles to New York on Google Maps 8-bit Quest mode, it's not nearly the same route as the one in the video. Curious they missed that.
It’s been April Fools Day in New Zealand for 14 hours, so I guess rather than it being setup in advance, they just launched it in time for the first country to hit 1/4.
There's a :P monster lurking at 35.371205,138.639039. He alludes you despite zooming in. There are some interesting images all over this area of the map.
Launching these changes couldn't be quick, easy, or cheap, especially when accompanied by the polished intro video, and while incredibly cute, I wonder how many here would have preferred for Code Search to continue life in exchange for not expending resources on feel-good projects like this, or e.g. the frequent doodles, the novelty of which has long since worn off.
True, but—a happy employee is a productive employee. If you get to build something a bit silly, a bit cheeky, a bit different every now and again—wouldn't you like your job just that little bit more?
Does anyone else see these projects, the always changing Google logo, and G+ as proof that Google just has way too much talent and not enough useful ideas?
These projects and the changing Google logo can be thought of as marketing expenses to maintain Google's brand, which helps them continue to attract users and developers.
G+ is built for strategic reasons (and not something they're just doing because they don't know have 'enough useful ideas'.) You can debate whether G+ is the right thing for them to do, but they're building it because Google leadership thinks they should.
You are right. However, successfully selling products to people isn't fun. See Apple. If some Google homies got together in their spare or 20% time (does that still exist?) and utilized the Google tools to make this, then sweet. But, if some engineers getting paid $80k+ used their work time to build this, doesn't that suggest Google has too much talent?
I like fun (and Google), but investors like profits.
No. Keeping the system from visually stagnating, and having fun with your users, is one of those useful ideas... Besides, I doubt the artists are taking resources from feature developers. If anything, they're probably sitting idle between roll-outs.
This looks... erm ... neat. A "sophomore OpenGL term project" kind of neat. Baidu on the other hand does the maps right [0], which hardly surprising given their 20 years of head start.
On a more general note, this reminds me of old Microsoft's tactics. Google should really stick to the search, but instead they throw together something that mimics competitor's feature. Something that looks more featureful and which is free, but upon closer inspection is effectively a half-ass effort, because it's an entirely different domain that's not their specialty.
The same comment, from two different accounts. Both related to Google products. Is this the 2012 version of "Netcraft confirms that BSD is dying"?
solsenNet 32 minutes ago | link
This looks... erm ... neat. A "sophomore OpenGL term project" kind of neat. Baidu on the other hand does the maps right [0], which hardly surprising given their 20 years of head start. On a more general note, this reminds me of old Microsoft's tactics. Google should really stick to the search, but instead they throw together something that mimics competitor's feature. Something that looks more featureful and which is free, but upon closer inspection is effectively a half-ass effort, because it's an entirely different domain that's not their specialty.
[0] http://map.baidu.com/?newmap=1&l=15&tn=B_DIMENSIONAL....
huhtenberg 23 hours ago | link | parent | flag
This looks... erm ... neat. A "sophomore OpenGL term project" kind of neat. Wolfram on the other hand does the graphs right [0], which hardly surprising given their 20 years of head start.
On a more general note, this reminds me of old Microsoft's tactics. Google should really stick to the search, but instead they throw together something that mimics competitor's feature. Something that looks more featureful and which is free, but upon closer inspection is effectively a half-ass effort, because it's an entirely different domain that's not their specialty.
[0] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sqrt%28x*x%2By*y%29%2B3....
(spoilers warning)
This is what you get: http://i.imgur.com/JJxGn.png
There's also another one in a deeper zoom level.