Hi Folks,

Iam trying to use hires satellite images (like google maps) in a game. Where can I get such things?
I want free colored orthogonal images where I can see buildings on it and so on. Do I have any chance to get something like that?

The USGS website has loads of geographical data like this, and I think it's in the public domain - it's certainly freely available to download. I've never used the colour imagery, only the elevation data, so I don't know how high-resolution it is, though.

I realize this thread is almost a month old but you have two options.

Option 1 is to create your own hi-res map of a specific area by using a combination of Google Earth, Sketchup and Photoshop. What you will need to do is create a box on sketchup of a predetermined size in meters. Delete the center of the box, leaving only the black outline. Export that to Google Earth.

Now you will need to use the black box as a reference point and capture the image frame by frame. It is time consuming.
When you are done, fire up photoshop and splice all the images together to make one big image. It is also time consuming.

Once finished, crop the image to an appropriate size and use it in whatever engine you had planned. This technique is fairly common with modders using the crytek engine. The resolution is so-so but provides a good guideline for repainting the ground with sharper textures.

Option 2 is to go through GeoEye. Which means shelling out some dough for their high-res imagery. It used to cost between $25 - $40 per square kilometer depending on how high resolution you wanted. But that was a few years ago. I don't know how much it costs now.