In Beamng.Drive, I think that it would be very intresting if I could drive around on Google Maps or Earth. In the game, there are a limited number of maps, and even some of the mods can get old. If BeamNG partnered with Google, this could be possible to do with some time and effort. In the game, the maps are not bigger than 4 sq KM, but the earth is millions upon millions of square KM, meaning that no matter how much you play, it would be near impossible to drive all the way down every road on earth. If BeamNG took their high-quality map skills and Google let them use Earth, that could lead to a really fun experience. The map should be stored online, since it would take up an unreasonable amount of storage on people's computers. With it being online, people could drive around together, so there could be thousands or even millions of people interacting with each other in the game. On the map, people could zoom out really far and teleport to an area that they know, or an area to explore. When people reset their location, that could be their spawn point (even if they leave the map) until they reset again. Overall, if this happened, it could bring in many, many people to purchase the game, there would be many more detailed videos on youtube, and it could possibly make BeamNG.Drive the next game with the populatity of minecraft.
Hate to be the burster of bubbles, but that would be impossible unfortunately. Google Earth simply isn't detailed enough for a video game. The map would be so low quality, no one would want to play on it regardless of size. To bring it up to standard (adding light poles, vegetation, traffic lights, removing flat cars from the road textures, etc.) would take a team of any size years, if not decades of work. There's a reason it's never been done before except by flight sims where you don't need much ground detail. And it's debatable now whether or not multiplayer is possible, forget thousands of people on one server. The technology for something of this scale to work simply doesn't exist. Maybe in 50 years when the average person has a relative supercomputer and gazillion gigabit internet, but now even the best can't sustain a good frame rate with more than 6-7 cars on a small singleplayer map.
Well, with a change of thought, they could be put out as a separate folder on the mods page, in 16 sq mi chunks, so the oceans and unpopulated areas wouldn't be there. There could also be ones that you could connect to that are in 1024 sq mi chunks that up to 24 people can be in at once. The time may come where it is possible, but for now, it could be a feature that is able to be purchased for something like 14.99 or 24.99. With this, enough people may purchase it that they could afford servers to do a such thing. I understand that it would be extremely difficult and expensive, but it can be possible.
