Use of public domain scientific images in games?

Use of public domain scientific images in games?

Postby Julius » 12 Jun 2013, 12:05

As most of you are probably not aware yet, NASA has made their new Landsat8 images available as public domain (they are worldwide 15m/pixel resolution satelite images updated every 16 days).
See some examples here:
http://blog.imagico.de/landsat-8-starti ... perations/
Due to some neat color enhancements the pictures look REALLY nice and I started to wonder if those might not be of use for game development too. Just to texture some terrain, they are probably too low resolution for most games, but for some high altitude flight sims, or some low orbit space games they might be quite awesome. But well... maybe some of you have some more crazy ideas ;)

One upcoming commercial RTS game (Hardware, by the creators of Homeworld) I recently saw has a really cool looking low-orbit camera view which might be something one could replicate:
http://blackbirdinteractive.com/games/ (scroll down a bit). However even for such use the Landsat images might be a bit too low in resolution.

Anyways... I am looking forward to what kind of ideas you have.
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Re: Use of public domain scientific images in games?

Postby NaN » 12 Jun 2013, 13:35

That will be some serious amount of data...

Blue marble 500m/pixel makes 156MB jpeg http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view.php?id=74418

15m would mean about 1000 times more pixels ~ 150GB :O
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Re: Use of public domain scientific images in games?

Postby Julius » 12 Jun 2013, 14:16

Well obviously I am not talking about the full set, but only an small part or a down sampled version. Much of the Landsat data is anyways blocked by clouds, so one would have to carefully select a nice area to use.

P.S.: For a webbased game one could stream the data from a server like google maps does it though ;)
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Re: Use of public domain scientific images in games?

Postby qubodup » 12 Jun 2013, 23:01

I tried out http://blog.imagico.de/landsat-8-starti ... perations/ in http://trigger-rally.sf.net/ and it makes a nice snow scenery and heightmap, just missing a road (we have a nice tutorial for making maps).
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Re: Use of public domain scientific images in games?

Postby farcodev » 20 Jun 2013, 04:19

Thanks for the info about it, these landsat 8 images are very good.
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