Planet, a company that runs “the largest fleet of Earth-imaging satellites in orbit”, use those satellites to take hi-res, zoomed-in shots of the surface. Some of those are isometric, and that’s got me longing.
I know that Cities: Skylines is pretty and fun, and that even EA’s disastrous SimCity reboot looked good, but I look at these images (via @devonzuegel) and I don’t see pictures of the Earth.
I see screenshots of the world’s biggest, most beautiful city-building game, one that exists in a parallel universe where this is a genre with room for more than one big game.
Image: Planet
If you’re after something like this and find Cities: Skylines a bit too cartoony, people are still modding the hell out of SimCity 4.
Comments
5 responses to “Low-Level Satellite Photos Look Like The Best City-Building Game Ever Made”
Wow, sales of terracotta roof tiling must be through the roof in Sao Paulo.
Through the roof, I see what you did there.
how exactly do you render REAL LIFE in isometric form?
or is it such a wide lens that it gives them impression of isometry?
Just the sheer distance between viewpoint and target flattens the image which gives you the illusion of isometry.
It’s the opposite: an incredibly narrow angle lens, actually.
A photograph is effectively the projection of rays of light through the lens. With a wide angle lens, you’re going to have light from many angles projected onto the image. With an extreme telephoto lens mounted on a satellite, you’ll have a very narrow range of angles that are about as close to parallel as you can get for a photo like this.
It’s not isometric, but about as close as you can get.