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3D Buildings in Flight Simulator in Google Earth Pro

Thank you to GEB reader Paul Moskowitz for bringing to our attention the fact that opening the flight simulator in Google Earth Pro automatically turns off the 3D buildings layer. The reason for this is that back in 2008 Google was concerned that showing 3D buildings in Flight Simulator mode would be a performance problem for some computers, so, with the release of Google Earth 4.3 they set the 3D buildings layer to be automatically disabled. At some point they reversed that decision, probably due to user complaints or the fact that computer performance has significantly increased since then, and they removed the setting from the standard version of Google Earth. However, it would appear that they forgot to do the same in Google Earth Pro. At the time, Google Earth Pro was a paid for product and thus was used only by people wanting specific features found only in Google Earth Pro. However, in January 2015, Google decided to make Google Earth Pro free and since then more and more people are using Google Earth Pro and ditching the standard version altogether. You can, however, have them both installed at the same time if you wish.

The result is that more people will be trying out the Google Earth Flight Simulator in Google Earth Pro, so we thought it would be a good time to relook at a workaround that Frank posted in 2008 for getting the 3D buildings back in Flight Simulator mode. These steps must be repeated each time you enter Flight Simulator mode:

  1. Enter Flight Simulator mode – Select Tools->Enter Flight Simulator (Windows/Linux) or Options->Enter Flight Simulator (Mac)
    or Ctrl + Alt + A(Windows/Linux) or + Option + A (Mac)
    Optional: fly to a city which has 3D buildings (grab our KML map to find out where).

  2. Hit SPACE to pause the flight simulator.

  3. Open the Sidebar – Sidebar shortcut – Press Ctrl + Alt + B (Windows/Linux)
    or + Option + B (Mac) to bring up the sidebar.

  4. Turn on 3D Buildings – Turn these on in the Layers pane in the lower left after the sidebar opens.

  5. Turn Off Sidebar – IMPORTANT – before resuming the flight simulator, turn off the sidebar by hitting the sidebar shortcut from step 2.

  6. Resume flight – Now you can resume flying the flight simulator by hitting the SPACE key and the 3D buildings should stay on for your current flight.

NOTE: – See GEB’s Tips on Using Flight Simulator.

Google Earth Pro print options advanced formating

When Google Earth Pro was first made available for free we had a look at the advanced printing options in Google Earth Pro that are not found in the standard version.

We recently had an enquiry from a GEB reader about how to change the background colour of the Title element. This YouTube video from Google gives some idea about what is possible and points out that the HTML Area element can contain just about anything that can be done with HTML, including an external website. However, it doesn’t mention that the Title and Legend elements can also be styled with HTML and CSS.

If you want a fancy title, one easy solution is to simply turn off the title element and use the HTML Area element instead, as that is easier to work with. However, if you want more than one section of text on your map you may find it easier to use both.

To change the background colour or transparency of the Title element, have a look at the contents of the HTML Area element element to get an idea of how it works there. The HTML Area element has a DIV with an id of ‘white_box’. It turns out that both the Title and the Legend boxes also have an identical DIV.

So for example, if you want to get rid of the background in the Title element simply edit the element and paste the following text anywhere. We recommend putting it at the end of the description for neatness.

<style>#white_box{background:none}h1{color:white}p{color:white}</style>

The above also changes the heading and description to white to make them more visible and to produce high quality materials. Note that the heading can be styled with the H1 tag and the description using the P tag.

The Legend element works exactly the same way – simply paste the above or your own styles into any of the legend entries.

Unfortunately, it seem that CSS gradients are not supported.

If you spend a long time working on the print settings be sure to save them, as they will otherwise be lost when you exit Google Earth Pro.

The above Title was formatted by adding the following text to the description:

<style>#white_box {background-color: #a2d7d8;border:5px #fcd059 solid;border-radius:20px}h1{color:#de5842;text-align:center}p{color:black;text-align:center;font-style:italic;font-weight:bold}</style>

Converting Shape files to KML with Google Earth Pro

We have been working on some code to determine whether or not a placemark lies inside or outside a polygon. We thought a nice use for that code would be to determine what country a placemark is in. For this we required the outlines of countries in KML format. We discovered ThematicMapping.org has a map of country outlines provided here. The Thematic Mapping API is a brilliant JavaScript API to help you create KML based thematic maps. See here for some of our previous posts about it.

The world country map is provided in what is known as the shapefile format. It is a popular format developed and maintained by Esri for use in GIS products. Google Earth Pro, it turns out, has built-in support for importing shape files. Simply go to File->Import then select “Esri Shape (*.shp)” from the file types list. Google Earth Pro then asks you if you want to apply a style template to the features you just ingested. We found that if we chose not to do so then all the shapes were named ‘[no-name]’. So, instead we chose to apply a style template which gives us the option to name the polygons from a field in a table of data included in the shapefile. One of the columns contains the country names, so we used that. There is also an option to colour the shapes based on a field in the data, all a single colour or random colours. We chose random colours. You can also set the icons and heights from fields in the data, but neither was appropriate in this case.


GEB reader Clare has noted that the map is a bit out of date with Sudan shown as a single country.

Once imported, if you click on one of the countries it shows a popup with some basic data about each country, such as name, area and population figures from 2005, which were contained in the shapefile. It is also now possible to save the dataset as a KML file. The resulting file is a little large, at 10.7MB, but compresses down to less than a third of that size when saved in the compressed KMZ format.

The original shapefile is shared under the Creative Commons ShareAlike licence, so you are free to use it on condition you give proper attribution to the original source. So, if you want some country outlines for use in Google Earth here is the KMZ version.

We have also created this version with all the extra country information removed, as well as changing the styles so as to only show country outlines.

Google Earth Pro layers being dropped

Google Earth Pro has a set of three layers that are not found in the standard version of Google Earth. They are “US Demographics”, “US Parcel Data” and “US Daily Traffic Counts”. As the names suggest they only have data for the US. If you open a popup for the Parcel Data layer a notice appears stating that all three layers will be removed from Google Earth on January 29th, 2016. There is also a link to this page which explains that the Parcel Data depends on Google Maps Engine which was deprecated in January 2015 and is set to be shut down on January 29th, 2016.

From what we can tell based on comments on the announcement thread and emails on the subject that we have received, it is the US Parcel Data layer that will be most missed. There appear to be quite a lot of people who use it on a daily basis and before Google Earth Pro was made free of charge, they paid for it specifically for access to the Parcel Data.

The Parcel Data layer includes outlines of ‘parcels’ which are pieces of land with a unique identification number used for things like ownership records, tax assessment and zoning. The information associated with each parcel varies considerable depending on the local authority.

As far as we know there is no single alternative source for free parcel data for the whole of the US. However, a number of sources are mentioned in the comments of the announcement thread.

Parcel outlines can be seen in Google Maps, but the associated data is not available, nor is the ability to search using an Assessor’s parcel number (APN) as you can in Google Earth Pro. You can also use the Google Maps API to make the parcel outlines more visible in Google Maps. See the the announcement thread for more details.

Geocoding with Google Earth Pro Import

When Google Earth Pro was made available for free earlier this year we showed you that it could import addresses to Placemarks. However, what may not have been so obvious is that the geocoding that it does works equally well with locations such as suburbs, cities or even countries.

To demonstrate how it works we chose three lists from Wikipedia.

The first is a list of countries and dependencies by area. The first step was to copy the data into Microsoft Excel and clean it up a bit. We decided to keep only the figures for the total area in square kilometres. We then saved the data as a csv file and imported it into Google Earth. There were 47 countries or dependencies that Google Earth failed to geocode on the first try. We managed to resolve some of the dependencies by removing the country name which was in brackets.

Strangely enough there were still 18 entries that failed:

We also noted that in the resulting KML, many of the Placemarks do not match the exact locations of country names as seen in Google Earth although, the ones we checked were at least in the correct countries.

It is also possible to colour code the Placemarks based on the figures in one of the columns, but we found that it didn’t really work well for this particular dataset, as the large area of Russia in relation to all the others caused the colour scale to be ineffective and the Placemarks are not really large enough to see the effect on the map.

The second is a list of the cities of Japan. We used the English name column as the Japanese characters would have posed some challenges. Google Earth Pro failed to geocode 125 of the 812 cities in the list. We tested some of the failed entries by searching in Google Maps and it was able to find them without any problem.


Japanese Cities according to Wikipedia. The colour of the icon reflects population density, and the height reflects population.

The third is a list of Cape Town Suburbs. To help with the geocoding we added the city and country to a column in Excel. On the first attempt, it failed to geocode 17 of the 125 suburbs. 7 were easily repaired by removing alternate names listed in brackets. However, there were still 10 suburbs that it failed to geocode. We tried searching for them in Google Maps and some were correctly found in Google Maps, while some where not.


Suburbs of Cape Town with Post Codes in the popups.

Notes:

  • It appears Google Earth Pro is not using Google maps data for geocoding.

  • When Google Earth Pro fails to geocode some location and you proceed without correcting them, they are all given the coordinates 0° latitude 0° longitude. You can then, if you wish, manually relocate them.

  • What we did not do for any of the above lists was to check whether the locations were accurate.

  • The geocoding returns just a Placemark with its latitude and longitude. A search for countries, cities or suburbs in Google Maps outlines the geographic area. Having a geocoding service that similarly returns the region for display in Google Earth would be very useful.

Overall, it looks like a useful service, however, if you find that there are a large number of failures, as we did for Japan, you may wish to search the web for alternative geocoding services and then import the data after the geocoding is already done.

To view the above datasets in Google Earth download this KML file.