Google Earth (v3.0) Release Notes - May, 2005 (v3.0.01xx - Public Beta) ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Minimum Configuration --------------------- - Windows 2000, or XP - Pentium 3, 500Mhz - 128M RAM - 200MB disk space - Network speed: 128Kbits/sec - 3D-capable video card with 16Mbytes of VRAM - 1024x768, "16-bit High Color" screen Recommended Configuration ------------------------- - Windows XP - Pentium 4 2.4GHz+ or AMD 2400xp+ - 512M RAM - 2 GB of free disk space - Network speed: 1.5 megabits/sec (DSL/Cable/T1/T3) - 3D-capable video card with 32 MB of VRAM or greater - 1280x1024, "32-bit True Color" screen Compatibility ------------- - "Google Earth Plus" replaces "Keyhole 2 LT" and "Keyhole 2 NV". It will ask to uninstall these for you, but it will remember your login information. This version is for non-commercial use only - "Google Earth Pro" replaces "Keyhole 2 PRO", for commercial use - "Google Earth EC" replaces "Keyhole 2 EC", the enterprise client - If you have a fresh machine that has never installed Keyhole or Google Earth and you have an active Keyhole 2 NV license, you'll need to first install Keyhole 2 NV (available from http://www.keyhole.com/body.php?h=downloads&t=keyhole2NV), run the program, authenticate and log in. After successful login, you can then run the Google Earth installer and it will find your newly existing NV login correctly. - Many new graphics-intensive features have been added, so graphics card compatibility is an issue. Be sure to update your graphics driver. - This version supports Windows 2000 and Windows XP. It does run on Windows Server 2003. It does not yet run on 98SE/ME/XP64. It has also been tested successfully with Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) with some exceptions: * If you install Windows XP SP2, it may DOWNgrade your driver to a version earlier than is found on the manufacturer's website. Some people report that such nVidia, Intel, and ATI drivers do not work with Google Earth. To avoid this problem, please do the following _after_ installing XP SP2: Go to the manufacturer's website, download, and install the latest driver. Note: Refer to the driver *version number* -- not the date -- to determine how up-to-date your driver is. - A minimum screen size of 1024x768 pixels is required. Also, "True Color (32-bit)" resolution and a sufficient graphics card are required for filled polygons; otherwise, they are displayed as outlines only. - The default OpenGL graphics rendering engine is the usually the best from both a performance and visual quality perspective. - The DirectX version of Google Earth can be selected in the Preferences panel. If there is a problem at startup, you can also change it from the Start Menu item. Use it on older machines and laptop computers that have trouble with the default OpenGL version. - The DirectX version of Google Earth requires DirectX 8.1 or newer. Microsoft's current release is 9.0c: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=0a9b6820-bfbb-4799-9908-d418cdeac197&displaylang=en - The ATI Omega drivers are not supported. If used, they produce frequent crashes in the client. Use only manufacturer recommended drivers. - If you have a Quadro, FireGL, or other workstation card that has problems with printing, movie making, or filled polygons (flashing or replicated on the screen), change one of the options in the advanced area of your Display Properties and then restart the Google Earth client. (eg: Control Panels->Display->settings->Advanced->3D for ATI) a) For ATI FireGL, find the application configuration section tab, and choose "3dsmax." ATI will soon be adding a "Keyhole" mode, so choose that if it is available. b) For Quadro, select the "use unified back/depth buffer" check box. - If the client crashes, then it will create a 'minidump' file that can help debug and fix the problem. It does not contain any personal information. If the option is selected in the installer, this is automatically sent to Google. The file names starts with "GoogleEarth" and contains the version number/type, the date and has a "dmp" extension. It is stored in your temporary directory: Path: C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Local Settings\Temp Example Name: Google_Earth_EC_3.0.0049_private_beta_050504-114650.dmp New Features ------------ - Geocoder, Local Search, and Driving Directions are now integrated with Google's search engine. The last 10 search entries are remembered. - 3D buildings are or will be available in 39 US cities, try San Francisco! - Draw Line and Draw Polygon are now available, including extruded and at-altitude items. - You can "drive to" and "drive from" any placemark, icon, or MyPlaces entry using the right-click context menu. - Search Results and MyPlaces now have a "snippet view," showing the first two lines of the description. - GPS data can now be viewed in Google Earth, either directly input from Garmin/Magellan devices (including Garmin USB interface), or by using .gpx or .loc file loading. - Streaming performance (updating data via the network) should be greatly improved. Server infrastructure at Google helps, but the software has also changed to take advantage of it. - A new filetype, KMZ, is available. KMZ files are KML files that have been zipped up along with their related files, such as image overlays. This means that you can share image overlays and custom icons without having to publish the files on an external web server or mail them as an attachment with the KML. - Style Templates can now be applied to "Import..." data and existing KML folders. - You can perform batch geocoding of street addresses using the Import menu item to import a .csv (comma-separated values) file - More flexible tour mode: touring a line (e.g., the route from driving directions) or touring a folder is now possible. Folder tours allow items to be checkboxed visible, but not be included in the tour path by limiting tour points to only one folder (checked or not). - The description now appears in an on-screen balloon instead of in the side window. - Web page results from search and URLs embedded in description can now be viewed in an embedded web browser (or, via options/preferences, in an external browser) - Rolling over an icon highlights the label. - you can now select lines and polygons. Use ctrl+leftclick to select/get-balloon-description. Use ctrl+rightclick to get the context menu (which will allow editing). - A new Latitude/Longitude grid is available. - Significant speed improvements in High-resolution Printing and Movie Making. - Double-click in the 3D view to point-n-zoom: The old single-click point-n-zoom mode has been moved to the options/preferences panel, but double-click on the earth and you will zoom in to that point. - The transparency slider now appears only when an image overlay is selected - Improved rendering performance. - Icons and lines can now be displayed at altitude. Icons at altitude and have a "stem" connecting them to the ground. - Polygons can be extruded or displayed at altitude. - GIFs (non-animated) can be used as overlays and icons. - ICO (.ico) files can used as icons. - Folder open-state is now remembered. - layer-enables (eg: terrain, lodging, earthquakes) are remembered between runs of the software. - Measure mode now optionally disables mouse navigation to simplify the task. - Movies can be saved as sequences of image files. - Movie Maker now has a 25/50 Frames-per-second (fps) option. - Google Earth can now be installed without administrative privileges (Plus only). - The installer now has option in to specify the install directory. - After installation, re-run the install and use the "modify" option to change the location Google Earth uses to store cache.dat and myplaces.kml. - The "High Res Places" and "World Places" menus have been removed and a small sight-seeing list has moved to the default_myplaces.kml file. As you will see, tracking the high-resolution places in new Google Earth data has gone beyond the list stage. - New mouse controls for tilt and rotate. These controls are accessed by pressing down on the scroll wheel (or middle mouse button). To tilt the camera, hold the scroll wheel down while moving the mouse up and down. To rotate the camera, hold the scroll wheel down while moving the mouse left and right. To rotate without tilting (e.g. to do a 360 degree rotation), hold the shift key and scroll wheel down while moving the mouse in a circular motion around the center of the screen. - a new/old G-force mode has been added to navigation. Use leftmouse/rightmouse for acceleration/deceleration. Set it in Tools/Options/Control or use ctrl-G, ctrl-T, and ctrl-Z to switch between navigation modes. - KML additions/changes: the KML parent tag has been added to allow versioning of KML. It will prevent old clients from loading new KML. tag for remembering open state of folders , a replacement for the that handles terrain correctly. Keyhole 2.2's will continue to load and render correctly in 3.0, but is deprecated {Style changes}, styles have been rewritten to make attributes orthogonal between icon, line, and polygons. Old 2.2 styles are deprecated but will continue to work in this release.
, allows KML to specify location by address instead of lat/long. When the Google Earth client loads this KML, it will try to geocode the item. Failed items will be geocoded to [0,0] to avoid hitting the geocoder on subsequent loads. , allows the snippet-view text to be different than the description. Useful for supplying an abbreviated description. {screen space overlays}, the syntax has changed and some 2.2 overlays may not work. Because these were a hidden feature, backwards compatibility was not handled. Fixes and Known Issues ---------------------- Fixes: - In rare cases, Google Earth would crash on exit while saving MyPlaces and lose either the session data or the whole file. Many changes have been made to better protect against this situation, including a more reliable backup mechanism. - Entries in MyPlaces will no longer occasionally be re-ordered during a exit/restart. - Road labels are now drawn in higher quantity at low altitude. - Shared display styles from an imported folder can now be disabled by moving their contents into new folders and applying a new shared display style. - Labels in prints are no longer truncated. - Overlay images now retain their aspect ratio when imported. - Google Earth now works with Windows Server 2003 - Multiple image overlays loaded simultaneously no longer sporadically fail to load. - Network link refresh will no longer sporadically fail and need to be manually restarted. Known issues (May 24th): - The geocoder (aka "fly to") search interface only handles US/CA/UK street/city names right now. Other countries will be supported before post-beta release. - pausing a tour of a route/path does not restart correctly - Google Earth does not run on Windows 98/ME or Windows XP-x64 - KML files created with Google Earth can not be loaded by Keyhole 2.2. It will result in a "parse error at line 2" in Keyhole. This is permanent. - The Measure tool is not accurate for small areas (building-sized) - driving-directions/measure/lines do not draw with thickness in DX - DirectX can't change the thickness of wireframe borders. - changing the 3D font to something 9 points or smaller can permanently corrupt Google Earth. Uninstall/Reinstall is the only path out. - If you have having trouble connecting to Google Earth servers and you your machine has a software firewall like: McAfee Personal Firewall Norton Personal Firewall ZoneAlarm Microsoft Windows XP service pack 2 (SP2) Firewall you may have inadvertently blocked Google Earth's access to the internet. Please verify that GoogleEarth.exe is not explicitly blocked and that access to "port 80" is available for non-browser applications. You can typically find these settings by opening your anti-virus software preferences. - If you are having trouble printing or making movies where the resultant image is tiled or otherwise defective, try to keep the 3D view window uncovered during the render. If your card allows it, switching to the DirectX 3D renderer in the Preferences panel and restarting is a better solution to this problem. - This will typically be seen on workstation-class graphics cards like FireGL or Quadro To work around this problem on ATI FireGL's OpenGL, go to the properties panel of the Display, choose settings--> Advanced--> select the tab named "OpenGL" or "graphics" and select the "3dsmax" profile. - For Quadro, select the "use unified back/depth buffer" check box inside the Advanced Display Properties settings. - If you have a modern, high-performance graphics card, you should see a smooth frame rate in most cases. If you are seeing a choppy frame-rate, one (obscure) explanation may be your AGP port speed. We have noticed that ATI cards tend to fall back from AGP 4x to AGP 0x (aka PCI speed) and do so without warning you. Go to the display control panel-> settings->advanced and see if it tells you what speed it is running. Fixing this is sometimes hard, involves BIOS changes, motherboard driver updates (eg: Via4in1), and maybe hardware configuration changes. - Embedded HTML in the description can include font/style/table tags, but IMG SRC can only refer to files on the local machine (eg C:\, not http://) Graphics Card/Driver Compatibility Notes ---------------------------------------- Typically, OpenGL has a better visual appearance due to standardized access to features. If you can, use OpenGL. Typically, DirectX is more reliable on older graphics cards and may be your only choice in some circumstances. The ATI Omega drives are not supported. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !ALWAYS update your graphics drivers! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Desktop machines can always have their drivers updated from the chip provider's website (nVidia, ATI, Intel, S3...), but laptop machines are at the mercy of the manufacturer of the laptop (Dell, Toshiba, HP, ...) and how often they choose to adopt/publish updates for their graphics drivers. Even big-name manufacturers can be up to 1 year behind the updates from the chip provider. If you notice this, complain to your manufacturer about it... hopefully they will increase the speed of their updates. ATI FireGL* cards OpenGL - can have problems with movie/print/email-image when covered, To work around this problem on ATI FireGL's OpenGL, go to the properties panel of the Display, choose settings-->advanced-->select the tab named "OpenGL", "graphics" or "configuration" and select the "Keyhole" profile (which is available in the latest drivers). DirectX - Even though DirectX doesn't have the printing problem, OpenGL is recommended after the workaround above. Also DX may stop displaying the earth when removing or adding an external monitor, simply restart to fix. http://www.ati.com/support/driver.html ATI 340 IGP - driver 6.14.10.6422 or later (Motherboard driver section) OpenGL - doesn't work DirectX - works http://www.ati.com/support/driver.html ATI Rage, Rage Pro, XPERT 2000 OpenGL - doesn't work DirectX - doesn't work http://www.ati.com/support/driver.html ATI Rage128, Rage128Pro - driver (XP: 6.13.3279 or later, 2K: 5.13.01.3279 or later, WinME/Win98: 4.13.7192 or later) OpenGL - doesn't work DirectX - works (needs 32-bit True Color for e-mailing images, printing & movie making). Text can appear as white rectangles - to fix reduce the size of the Google Earth window or your screen resolution. Shading on buildings is linear instead of flat. Even with these problems, DX is recommended because of its' greater performance. http://www.ati.com/support/driver.html ATI Radeon 7000 - driver 6.14.10.6422 or later OpenGL - works, crashes with filled polygons (use DX for now) DirectX - works http://www.ati.com/support/driver.html ATI Radeon 8500+ - driver 6.14.10.6422 or later OpenGL - works DirectX - works http://www.ati.com/support/driver.html ATI Radeon X800 - driver 6.14.10.6517 OpenGL - works DirectX - works (Try turning on anti-aliasing in the ATI control panel, YMMV) http://www.ati.com/support/driver.html Intel 810/815 - driver 6.13.01.3196 or later OpenGL - works DirectX - on certain configurations, there are problems. Use OpenGL. Direct3D requires a 16-bit or 32-bit screen, so it will not run in 24-bit mode. - Intel 810/815 with .3198 driver and Windows XP-SP2-RC2 running OpenGL crashes. Don't install XP-SP2 on a machine with this graphics card. - Changing anisotropic settings can cause image corruption until restart. Intel 82845/82855 - driver 6.14.10.3847 or later OpenGL - driver has problems with filled polygons: they show up white DirectX - works CTRL+ALT+Up (or Down) Arrows are hot keys for the 845, so you can't fine-adjust zoom in/out http://downloadfinder.intel.com/scripts-df/Detail_Desc.asp?agr=N&ProductID=757&DwnldID=7511 Intel 82865G - driver .3762 OpenGL - works DirectX - works CTRL+ALT+Up (or Down) Arrows are hot keys for the 865, so you can't fine-adjust zoom in/out http://downloadfinder.intel.com/scripts-df/Detail_Desc.asp?agr=N&ProductID=757&DwnldID=7511 Matrox G400/G450/G550/Parhelia 128 OpenGL - works (g550 does not work for filled polygons, disable advanced features if you have problems) DirectX - does not work at all, must use OpenGL nVidia GeForce 1/2MX - driver .6177 (aka 6.1.7.7) OpenGL - works DirectX - works http://www.nvidia.com/content/drivers/drivers.asp nVidia TNT2 - driver .6177 OpenGL - works DirectX - works http://www.nvidia.com/content/drivers/drivers.asp nVidia GeForce4 MX-400 (420/440) - driver .6177 OpenGL - has problems with printing and movie making, use DirectX DirectX - works http://www.nvidia.com/content/drivers/drivers.asp nVidia GeForce* - driver 71.84 OpenGL - update driver to 71.84 to eliminates many printing problems DirectX - works http://www.nvidia.com/content/drivers/drivers.asp nVidia Quadro* cards - driver .6177 OpenGL - may have problems with movie/print/email-image when covered, select the "use unified back/depth buffer" check box in the Advanced tab of the Display->Advanced->OpenGL options and then restart. DirectX - works http://www.nvidia.com/content/drivers/drivers.asp Via S3 Unichrome - driver .0074 OpenGL - renders incorrectly... use DirectX DirectX - works http://www.s3graphics.com/drivers.html Via S3 Savage4 OpenGL - reverts to software rendering DirectX - does not start http://www.s3graphics.com/drivers/Legacy/8A22Savage4_395drv/395drv.html Via S3 SuperSavage, ProSavage DDR - driver .0074 OpenGL - renders incorrectly and/or crashes due to driver problems, must use DirectX DirectX - works, no filled polygons. Some screen sizes may not be able to go full-screen without getting "Apologies - Internal Error." Try reducing your screen size, Google Earth detail area, Google Earth pixel depth to 16, and/or screen depth to 16). http://www.s3graphics.com/drivers/Legacy/index.html - In DirectX, email-view, copy-view, and print will not work if your S3 Display depth is 16-bit, so you may have to decide whether you want full screen or email-view because both may not be possible. SiS 315e - SiS UniVGA3 Graphic Driver (v3.60) - Released 2004-07-09 OpenGL - works but has severe rendering problems, no filled polygons, may crash DirectX - works http://www.sis.com/support/support_prodid.htm (really easy for updating) SiS 650e - 6.14.10.3571 OpenGL - works, problems rendering movies DirectX - works, problems rendering movies http://www.sis.com/support/support_prodid.htm 3Dfx - untested, requires Win98 support which isn't yet available DISCLAIMERS =========== * The Address Search feature in Google Earth does not guarantee pinpoint accuracy. The application relies on a geocoded database that attempts to interpolate the location of an address. This interpolation is done by taking the total number of addresses in a given "block" and assuming an even distribution of the addresses along that block. [For example, in the 800 block of Main Street there are ten addresses in the database. The application assumes that the fifth address is located at the half-way point of the 800 block.] * The coordinates, elevations, distances, and measurements provided by Google are approximations only. Google makes no claims as to the accuracy of these measurements. IN NO EVENT SHALL GOOGLE BE LIABLE TO YOU OR ANYONE ELSE FOR ANY DIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, INDIRECT OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OF ANY KIND, OR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION, LOSS OF PROFIT, LOSS OF USE, SAVINGS OR REVENUE, OR THE CLAIMS OF THIRD PARTIES, WHETHER OR NOT GOOGLE HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH LOSS, HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE POSSESSION OR USE OF THE MEASUREMENTS PRODUCED BY THIS SOFTWARE.