Virtual Earth and XNA Game Development

Here’s some sickness. I’m sure the first time you saw Microsoft Virtual Earth you were thinking, “Wow, is this going to integrate with Microsoft Flight Simulator?” Then, if you’ve ever seen me or one of my colleagues demonstrate Virtual Earth 3D you’ve probably seen us show off our Xbox controller support which then had you asking, “WHEN is this going to integrate into Flight Simulator??” I know because I still get asked those questions. I don’t have a timeline for that or any reason to believe it will happen, but Omri Fima pushes the game developer community a bit closer to making it a reality. Omri has built out what he is dubbing the “Geographic Application Framework for XNA”.

What is XNA?
Microsoft® XNA™ is composed of industry-leading software, services, resources, and communities focused on enabling game developers to be successful on Microsoft gaming platforms.

So, now, you game developers can start creating some killer titles using Microsoft Virtual Earth as the base platform. Omri was even nice enough to provide a link for you to download the same code. I should note that this was done in an unsupported way and requires at least a license to actually use Virtual Earth in this fashion, so ensure you get a license! Send mail to the Virtual Earth Licensing Team and get cracking.

CP