Hi, looking at this little "toy" flight simulator posted below (copy & paste link into browser), I can imagine the Google maps API would allow you to scrape some area and convert it into Flight Simulator for personal (noncommercial) use.http://www.isoma.net/games/goggles.htmlOf course it would have to be clarified how much data you can legally scrape off their servers without violating terms & service. Maybe one would have to perform a slow, throttled download until the required area has been scraped.With personal use only in a flight simulator I would not see a major problem regarding licensing terms. Just the volume of data (several hundred MB) might pose a major problem (for Google's bandwidth bills)I could also imagine a filesystem driver that delivers those images "on demand" and would request them from Google Maps when they are actually loaded by MS Flight simulator, similar to this toy flight simulator.This is just an idea for all the developers out there ;) the project is too big for me to tackle - I have a day job.Christian

Another version of a flight simulator with Google Maps, this one has clouds and a bird instead of a plane.http://www.markfennell.com/flash/wings/index.phpI just checked the Maps API and it appears that it forbids the use of "robots" to access the service. Now what is the definition of a robot? Is an on-demand loader a robot? Is it the lack of interactivity that constitutes a robot? I am sure these flight sims not qualify as robots (actually they are endorsed by Google themselves on their blog). So adding an on demand loader (virtual filesystem style) for MS FSX would be quite feasible. I'd say write a prototype first and ask questions later.I suggest implementing it as a SMB file system server (through a network) that gets served from a Linux box. It can be mounted as a drive letter (maybe even folder) under Windows and accessed from MS FSX.

From what I've seen, pulling down Google data results in "google" logo burned into all the map data.scott s..

Okay, I checked Samba, it does have support for VFS (virtual file system) modules which would make custom actions per file quite feasible. I think I will start hacking on that project, my Mac Mini might act as a tile cache using Samba. This will load and cache tiles on demand from the Google Tile server and perform a conversion into the format required by Microsoft Flight Simulator X.I want to fly on photo scenery everywhere and anytime, even if it has "Google Maps" imprinted on it (BTW the imprints aren't that bad after all). Wish me luck. From now on I will hang out in the scenery developers board to learn more about compiling one's own photoscenery.