The 3d WebGL Spitfire Flight Simulator

Over the last month the Google Earth Blog has been exploring some of the great 3d games created with the Google Earth API. However now that the Google Earth API is being deprecated it looks like 3d game developers will have to look to other platforms.

WebGL seems to be the format that most 3d globe makers are now moving towards. It wouldn't be surprising therefore if developers also started using WebGL more and more for developing 3d WebGL environments for games as well.

That's certainly the direction that Chung Nguyen has taken for his excellent WebGL Flight Simulator. I've played a lot of flight simulators created with the Google Earth API and this WebGL flight simulator is as good as any of them. In fact it is better as it doesn't seem to suffer from the lagging problems which seem so common with the Google Earth API.

In the WebGL Flight Simulator you can fly a number of different planes. You can also chase and fire at other planes within the 3d environment. I'm not sure if the WebGL generated 3d environment is itself based on real mapping data. It appears that it might be as the instructions say that 'you can also fly to any place around the world' (although I haven't managed to do that myself yet).

There are three links to (different versions of?) the game. I've only managed to get the second link to work. This might be because of the WebGL enabled browser I'm using so it might be worth trying the other two links as well.