Release Notes for Google Earth 5.1
Google Earth 5.1 release is mostly a performance and bug fix release upgrade over Google Earth 5.0. Salient changes include:
All of the notes for the Google Earth Application apply to browser plugin version. Additional changes include:
Release notes for Google Earth 5.0.1
- Improved Startup Time. The improvement is most noticeable when users launch the Earth application multiple times.
- Improved overall rendering performance. Changes include faster atmosphere rendering and using compressed textures whenever possible.
- Improved Road rendering Performance: Frame rate at places with dense road networks is three times faster than in previous releases.
- Improved memory utilization in the application.
- Significantly smoother frame-rate and less stuttering in the application compared to previous releases.
- Improved performance with large region based network link KML documents. Some of large KML documents are now processed and rendered at more than twice the speed of earlier releases.
- Improved KML document handling performance. Large regionated KML Image overlays are up to 80% faster than previous releases.
- Support for KML hint = moon or mars to switch to moon or mars based on kml document.
- Availability of one installer that installs both the Google Earth application and browser plugin.
- Desktop Application now works on Windows 7.
- Users can set the memory cache size up to 1024 MB now.
All of the notes for the Google Earth Application apply to browser plugin version. Additional changes include:
- API additions: Please refer to API documentation for details.
- KmlListStyle::listItemType and KmlListeItemTypeEnum
- google.earth.executeBatch(fn)
- GETourPlayer::get/setCurrentTime
- GETourPlayer::getDuration
- GESchemaObject::release()
- Experimental feature KmlFeature::get/setOpacity
- Improved performance for Javascript application by allocating time for it in Google Earth.
- One installer available that installs both desktop application and browser plugin.
- 3D Buildings: OpenGL mode performance is improved. Buildings are streamed in smoother, and low memory situations are handled better.
- Tours: Make flyto and tour paths smoother by fixing several cases for jitters and unexpected jumps in camera path. Improve tour creation so that the tour path has smooth interpolation. On pause, open balloons are left open instead of closing them. Support generating tours from nested folders of placemarks.
- Collada Models: Enhance collada model handling to work when Multiple resources associated with same model. Improve handling of animated textures on the models.
- Pro Movie Maker: Fix movie maker to work well in presence of animated water surface. Fix holes seen in high resolution movies. Fix bugs in creating large AVI movies. Fix a crash while recording movies. Fixed high resolution movie creation in cases where it would distort view.
- Fix installation failure on 64 bit linux machines related to linking against wrong version of libssl.
- Improved culling of objects near poles.
- Fix the case where Earth kept continuously updating after a tour was finished.
- Fix handling of drag and drop in left menu between folders.
- Remove occasional spurious scrollbars in balloons.
- Fix holes in high resolution movies and printing. Fix tears in high resolution image save and print when animated water was in view.
- Fix a crash in switching to Mars from photo view.
- Fix Mars atmosphere for some graphics cards so that it shows up with red color instead of blue now.
- Show appropriate historical imagery tickmarks when zoomed way in.
- Fix cases that let sound continue playing even after a balloon was closed or tour was paused.
- Fix text clustering when eye is below water.
- Fix a crash on shutdown.
- Fix issues with handling altitude modes in <Camera> tags below and above water.
New to Google Earth 5.0 and later:
Improvements in Google Earth 5.0:
Known Issues in Google Earth 5.0:
- Support for displaying underwater terrain, water surface and underwater 3D models.
- Support for historical imagery including new UI element to allow selection of historical imagery assets.
- New touring feature that allows a tour or presentation to be recorded and played back. It also allows sound recording and playback.
- Support for full HTML, Javascript and iframes in balloons shown in Earth.
- Support for Mars imagery/terrain/layers through drop-down menu for sky and planets.
- Support for 15 new languages, for a total of 41 total languages.
- New unified user interface for time in Earth, supporting sunlight, time-based KML, and historical imagery.
- Redesigned user interface icons and splash screen.
- Support for opening description balloons by clicking on lines and polygons.
- Support for arbitrary corner positions for ground overlays
- 3D buildings enabled by default on capable machines.
- Full scene anti-aliaising in OpenGL mode on Windows systems.
- GPS device track import (46 new devices) and real-time tracking now in free version. You can find more information at http://earth.google.com/userguide/v4/ug_gps.html
- More prominent bouncing of labels for KML content.
- Separate installers targetted for installing for All users or single user on Windows.
- Faster start-up time.
- Earth honors cache settings more rigorously.
- Faster processing of KML files.
- Significant performance improvements for 3D buildings in DirectX mode.
- Enhanced support for anisotropic filtering.
- Improved level of detail computation for better performance and quality.
- Use OGC standard KML name when saving KML files.
- Support for installers for users with non-administrative priviledges on Vista.
- Improved performace for regionated KML files.
- Improved performance in Pro version printing images, saving images and capturing movies.
- Added HD view / output sizes.
- In low memory situations, 3D buildings may not get displayed on Earth. Some of the workarounds include increasing cache size from options menu, restoring defaults from options menu, restarting application and clearing memory cache.
- On some windows systems, sound recording may not work. In this case, you can fix it by installing Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable Package (x86).
- For KML content, balloon formatting may be different as compared to previous versions and an unnecessary horizontal scroll bar may show up.
- Switching to sky from Mars does not change the search box to do sky search. As a workaround, you would need to switch to Earth and switch back to sky.
- Sometimes, overlays drawn on ocean surface may also get drawn on the underwater terrain.
- Missing images in balloons may cause balloons to flicker.
- In KMZ files with network links, styles from a link do not always override styles from parent file.
- KML files saved from client have unnecessary extra namespace declaration.
- Using a "fly to" (by double clicking a place mark) when recording a tour might lead into a jitters in recording.
