Problem Playing Tours

I have been using Google Earth for close to 6 or 7 years now, and there is this problem that has been plaguing me pretty much the whole time; and I keep waiting around for the problem to be fixed, but it never happens, and so now I'm starting to wonder if other people are even having it.

It's like this:

I record and track all of my hikes on Google Earth; and I like to play the flyover tours whenever I want to show people trips I've done. The problem is that whenever I play a tour, the thing can't go more than about a half mile or so before the track leaves the ground and starts pointing in all kinds of random directions that have no correlation to the track as traced. Along with this, the scenery will all become blurry to the point of being unseeable. Then I have to pause and wait awhile while the app "catches up", the blurry landscape comes back into focus, and the track finally snaps back down to the ground. Then I unpause, and the tour advances another half a mile or so until the problem happens again. Needless to say, this sucks all of the fun out of playing the tours.

Is this something that has to do with my computer's video capabilities or something? Is something Google is even aware of? (of course it is, Google knows everything) I'm figuring if it was a problem on the Google Earth end, it would have been fixed by now. But if there is a workaround of some kind, I would love to know what it is. The problem has become so annoying that I'm considering stopping using Google Earth altogether, though I know that option would not really satisfy me in the end.

Anyway, any light anyone can shed on this would be much appreciated.

Thank you

Hi deekadelic,



It's nice to meet another GE tour fan. I've posted a lot of tours, and every day (except rainy days when I tent-up in my poncho and ride circuits in a nearby park) I make a tour of my daily bicycle rides. I suspect that there are lots of reasons why your tours are less than satisfactory. For one thing, the follow-the-path tour making tool has radically changed over time. (See the discussion of how it changed from GE v 6.0xxx and 6.1xxx in >>THIS THREAD<< in the old GEC.) I suspect the touring function changes at least a bit with each new version of GE. My favorite tour, the flyover tour of the Eagle Cap Wilderness Area worked flawlessly when it was first written (in v. 5 something, I think), but with each new version it has worked less well, and by v. 7 it's even loosing continuity (the image stutters from time to time).



The problem of the leaping path is also getting progressively worse. My flyover of the old Tōkaidō road didn't seem to have that problem when it was first written. It seems to happen as the path is passing through rough terrain, and seems pretty smooth over flat areas. This is borne out in my Ise Pilgrims Road tour and my Oregon Trail tour, where much of both routes is mountainous. Like you, the only cure I've found is to stop the tour, but I suspect a more steep view angle and a lower eye level = camera range (less data to update) might help.



I think the blurry imagery is probably a function of your internet connection speed, the quality of your graphics card, and the power of your cpu (if your graphics card doesn't do all the display work independently). You might try slowing down your touring speed, increasing the view angle, and pre-running the tour so that the imagery is in the cache, ready and waiting. I have a fairly strong computer, and just about the fastest internet connection in the world, so if you'd ever like someone to test a tour for you, let me know.