Got the newest Google Earth 4 Beta here, and it works absolutely perfect on my system, especially now that overlays don't flicker anymore.

There's just one exception: When adding new overlays, the overlays receive a strange kind of border around the image, which seem like the colors at the edge of the image has been dragged out by a few pixels. When adjusting and positioning an overlay, this border is even outside the adjustment handles. Since the pixels cannot be dragged out in the corners, the corners have black squares in them. Pretty strange.

My hardware is a Dell 6400 laptop with an Intel dual core processor and an ATI x1400 256mb grapics accelerator. The bug is very annoying when trying to overlap several overlays, which now is impossible without noticing this weird border. Hope this is something that will be fixed in the next update

Edit: I'm even more puzzled to find out that the fuzzy borders around image overlays are not to be seen on an other computer with an old Ati radeon 32 mb card. However, on that computer the new updated Google Earth 4 Beta runs really slow with overlays on.

Re fuzzy edges sounds like the older card does not have antialiasing switched on or is incapable of it. Antialiasing or FSAA is usually used to eliminate jaggies from games and to give less abrupt cartoon-like edges/joins. Its use in GE may have the opposite effect i.e. obscure the detail of the data.

I wonder if there is a way to switch off antialiasing for the overlays but still have it for the terrain etc.

First off, I haven't looked to see if anyone else mentioned this....

When I installed Google Earth Beta, I put it on a different drive other than my system drive and, instead of reading any environment variables to find the system drive, google earth creates its own directory structure of "Documents and Settings" down to the user that's running it on that drive... Obviously this is a mere annoyance, but a minor bug nonetheless...

Daniel Wilson

The bug with the rendering of the colors of gif icons was introduced when Google Earth went from version 4.0.1565 to 4.0.1693 . Something must have been fixed or improved in version 4.0.1693, but I can't tell what (this is the only difference I detect). Unfortunately, Google Earth only posts version 4.0.1693 for download. Fortunately I had kept a copy of the installation file for version 4.0.1565. I am using this exclusively until they fix this annoying problem. I notified them many weeks ago about this problem, but received no response and to this day (Aug 15, 2006) only the buggy version is available for download. So for now I am making my copy of the 4.0.1565 version available for download here. I will remove this link as soon as they fix the bug. You should uninstall your version 4.0.1693 first before attempting to install the older version. I believe all your places will be automatically remembered after this reinstallation procedure. Good luck!

Stephane Coutu

You can no longer browse google earth within your cached data offline?

Hmm, tried to post a reply but couldn't find it again so here we go again... I found out that my problem with the strange dragged pixels border around overlays has to do with the anisotropic filtering. When I turn it off and restart GE the overlays look normal. If the program is restarted with anisotropic filtering on, the overlays get the strange border again. This happens on both my computers, one laptop with ati x1400 256 mb graphics and the other a standard pc with ati x800gto 256 mb graphics. Of course I could use GE with anisotropic filtering turned off, but I like to have a clear view all the way to the horizon when tilting the camera towards the ground.

Per the spec http://earth.google.com/kml/kml_tags_21.html#lookat
KML 2.1 is supposed to have <LookAt><Altitude> tags
but this does not work in GE 4.0.1693 beta (OpenGL, WinXP SP2.)

The two attached placemarks only differ by their own and
lookat altitudes, yet the viewpoind does not change from
one to the other. It's still looking at the ground underneath.

mce

GE4 Bug with NetworkLink ViewFormat/LookAt with terrain on.

I just noticed this after I upgraded from the GE4 beta to 4.0.1693.

Create a network link where the ViewFormat is set to send the lat, lon, range, and tilt to your server.

Have your server reflect back the lat, lon, range and tilt in a LookAt.

If terrain is turned on (and elevation exaggeration is non-zero) the view's range increases with each update. It should not change.

If terrain is turned off (or elevation exaggeration is zero) the view does not change (correct behavior).

I don't believe this was a problem with the previous GE4 beta and I know it was not a problem with version 3.