Plugins / Globe · In development
From orbit to the street. Anywhere on Earth.
Add the globe to a Talos Engine project and fly from space down to a single city block. It starts on free open data. When you have better data, your own city, your own imagery, plug it in.
From orbit down to Boulder, on open data.
- Orbit to rooftopOne smooth flight, no loading screen.
- Any place, your dataOpen data to start. Yours when you have it.
- Set up by your AIAsk for a place. It builds the flight and checks it loaded.
In development Built and tested. Not released yet: the plugin cannot be installed today.
Why it matters
Training needs the real place.
A driving scenario needs the real road. A flight scenario needs the real coastline, the real hills and the real city on the horizon.
Getting the real world into a simulation used to take a mapping specialist, a data pipeline and weeks before anyone saw a picture. With the globe it takes one line: add it, name a place, and you are looking at it.
See it
From space to a city block.
Data on screen
Nothing in these is retouched. Everything shown is open data, with the credit each source asks for.
- Terrain Tiles: Mapzen and AWS Open Data, from USGS (3DEP, SRTM, GMTED2010), NOAA (ETOPO1), EU-DEM (Copernicus) and national surveys.
- NASA Earth Observatory, Blue Marble: Next Generation; served by NASA GIBS.
- USDA, USGS The National Map: Orthoimagery.
- Helsinki 3D Mesh 2017 (c) City of Helsinki, CC BY 4.0.
What you can do with it
Go anywhere. Fly in like a film.
Go anywhere
Every place on Earth is there the first time you look, from 10,000 km up down to rooftop height.
Fly in like a film
List a few places and times. The camera glides between them, and the destination is already loaded when it arrives.
Put your scenario in its real location
Set your driving or flight scene where it really is. The globe becomes the ground and the horizon around it.
Start free
With no settings at all it uses open terrain and imagery. Nothing to buy, no account, no key.
Work offline
Prepare the data ahead of time and it runs at a site with no internet.
Stay smooth
60 frames a second through both fly-ins on an RTX 3080.
Your world, your data
The open data gets you the planet. Yours makes it your place.
The open data is sharp in some places and coarse in others. So the globe is built to take whatever you have that is better, in the standard formats.
Your city
A 3D city model or a drone scan drops onto the globe where it belongs. Helsinki looks the way it does here because the city publishes its model.
Your imagery
Point the globe at your own aerial or satellite image server, in front of the open imagery or instead of it.
Your terrain
The same for height data.
Your keys stay yours
If a data service needs a key, it is stored once on the machine: never in a project, a file you share or a log.
One line each
Every one of these is a single setting. No rebuild, no new engine version.
Your AI sets it up
We gave an AI three jobs and no help.
Talos Engine is built to be driven by an AI assistant. So we tested the globe the honest way: an assistant that had never seen the engine got the engine, the globe and three jobs. No help, no source code, no web search.
- We asked
Show me Paris from 5,000 m and prove it loaded.
Three commands. Loaded and confirmed in under 3 seconds.
- We asked
Make a 20-second fly-in from space into Helsinki, with the 3D city.
It wrote the flight, checked it and ran it. Worked the first time.
- We asked
Set up our company's private imagery server, with its key.
Wrote everything needed and kept the key out of the project.
What that means for you: say "put us over Denver" or "fly in to the port", and your assistant can do it and tell you, truthfully, whether it worked.
plugin info globeplus the README "Working with it step by step" gave a near copy-paste path: add, run, wait, read the status.
Two test runs, each with a fresh Claude Sonnet assistant, on these three jobs, on a machine that already held the data. Both finished all three. The first run found a bug in the engine and got one field of the third job wrong; we fixed the bug before the second run.
Questions people ask
- Do I need to know anything about maps?
- No. Name a place by its latitude and longitude, or ask your AI to.
- Does it cost anything to run?
- The data it uses by default is free and open. Your own data is yours.
- Is it sharp everywhere?
- No, and we would rather say so. The free imagery is detailed over the United States and coarse elsewhere. A place looks as good as the data you give it.
- Can I get it today?
- Not yet. It is built and tested, and it has not been released.
How it works, for the technical reader
- 01
The camera's view decides which pieces of the Earth are needed and how fine.
- 02
Background workers fetch and build them. The picture never waits.
- 03
A flight looks ahead, so the destination loads on the way.
- 04
The running scenario reports what is loading and what failed, in one status an assistant can read.
What plugs in
City models and scans as OGC 3D Tiles (1.0 and 1.1), imagery and terrain from tile servers by an address pattern, and data packs built ahead of time. It is a plugin: signed, checked file by file, and run in a sandbox that reaches only the folders and hosts it declares. Its code is 2.7 MB.
Measured
| Both fly-ins (Helsinki and Boulder), vsync on | 60 fps at every sample |
|---|---|
| On arrival | everything the view needs is already loaded |
| First visit to a place, nothing saved yet | ground complete 5 seconds after the camera arrives |
Measured on one graphics card, an RTX 3080, in a 1600x900 window, read every 2 seconds through each fly-in on an earlier build of the plugin, with the data already on the machine. The clips above were recorded frame by frame, not from a live window.
What it does not do yet
- The simulation does not read the globe: collision and ground contact are the scene's own.
- It runs in the engine and the editor's play mode on Windows and Linux. An exported build and the web build do not run this kind of plugin yet.
- Imagery is drawn unlit, and there is no glow of atmosphere at the Earth's edge.
- No clip here shows the globe around a scene of your own; that is built and covered by tests.
Commands the test assistant ran (the engine's name left off)
# every setting and where the guide is
plugin info globe
# add it to a project, over Paris
plugin add globe \
--set start.lat=48.8566 \
--set start.lon=2.3522 \
--set start.alt=5000
# run the project
run . --serve --port 7700 \
--viewport 1280x720
# wait for the view, save the picture
plugin run globe wait \
--port 7700 --out view.pngThe Boulder flight above: a list of five places
{"id":"globe","config":{"flight":[
{"t":0,"lat":15,"lon":40,"alt":10500000},
{"t":9,"lat":32,"lon":-100,"alt":10500000},
{"t":14,"lat":39.5,"lon":-105.4,"alt":400000},
{"t":19,"lat":39.93,"lon":-105.16,
"alt":9000,"heading":310,"pitch":-30},
{"t":25,"lat":40.005,"lon":-105.235,
"alt":2600,"heading":285,"pitch":-12}
]}}The real world, around your next scenario.
In development now. Ask us about it in a pilot.