alt Hacker NewsHi all! I'm the creator of Stowaway.live and I really appreciate you posting it here.
All this attention has maxed out my Google 3D Tiles quota, so the ground textures in ride-along mode are being throttled. Everything else works — sky, aircraft and satellite tracking, sound — it's just the terrain that may come in flat or missing. I'm working on a caching layer and a proper fallback rather than just buying my way out of it, and I'd take suggestions if anyone's solved this before.
Thanks for checking it out!
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Before you do that, check whether you'd be violating the ToS by caching tiles. I'm guessing, yes.
This is very neat! Great job :)
I can empathize with your quota....was gifted a FlightWall recently (https://theflightwall.com) and it constantly throws a 'too many flights' indicator given that I live in a major metro with quite a bit of air traffic. I'm sure it was thrilling and terrifying to see your usage spike. Wishing you all the best of luck!
Does this also generate atmospheric weather effects based on real-time weather data? Like if it's raining, would you see rain?
Maybe provide an option for the user to bring their own API key for prettier results.
Ah, that's why the ground is just a grey-green surface.
Don't waste too much on it. I fear popularity is brief.
There is good free data available. Consider using EASA Sentinel satellite tiles for the imagery, and JAXA's ALOS Global Digital Surface Model for elevation. And the USGS has higher-resolution lidar elevations in much of the US.