The photoreal world now needs an account from your second day
On 30 September a post on X sent us more visitors in one day than we usually see in a month. Thank you for coming, and thank you to everyone who took off: more than half of the people who opened the site went flying.
That day also showed us what the flight costs. The photoreal 3D world you fly over comes from Google. Every take-off opens a session with Google's 3D tiles, and every session is billed. Free usage covers a thousand sessions a month. On 30 September we used about two thousand in a single day, and most of them came from people who weren't signed in.
We didn't want to fix that by putting a sign-in wall in front of the flight. The photoreal world is the reason most people stay. Someone who arrives from a link and flies over their own city should see it at its best, without being asked for anything first.
So here is how it works from today:
- Your first day is free. No account needed. You fly the full photoreal world as long as you like, and reloading the page doesn't use anything up.
- From the next day (we count days in UTC), guests fly over the simple map. That's the same world we use in places Google has no 3D data for: real terrain, buildings, roads and water, drawn by us instead of photographed. Everything else still works: the live aircraft, the ships, the radio, the chat.
- Signing in brings the photoreal world back at once. Press Sign in in the small banner at the top, log in with Google, and the 3D world loads where you are. You don't need to reload or start again.
An account is free and it does more than unlock the 3D world. Your catches, photos, rank and fleet are kept on it and follow you to every device.
What we remember to make this work is one date in your browser's local storage: the day of your first guest flight. No name, no address, nothing sent to us. If you clear your site data, the browser counts as new.
If you hit something odd, for example the simple map showing up after you've signed in, tell us in Discord and we'll look at it.