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China Map using Baidu Maps

Since Google Maps isn’t in China, but the country has a greatly varied and interesting landscape, from megacities to countrysides, from deserts to jungles, and from mountains to prairies, it’s a shame it’s entirely excluded from GeoGuessr.

However, Baidu Maps, based in China, has a street view function that’s covered most of China, from the plateaus to Tibet to the snowy wilderness of Heilongjiang. Baidu Maps also has an API that could help implementing GeoGuessr on a new platform.
Yuhao Sun

Comments

  • Hi there! Agreed! We've looked at Baidu Maps a couple of times over the years, but so far we haven't gotten around to implementing support for it. If I remember correctly, the tools and API:s were not available in English, which somewhat slowed us down. 😀 As far as I understand, this have changed and we'll make sure to have another look.

    Best,

    Erland
  • maps.qq.com is also another Chinese service providing streetview pictures of China.

    Problem with Chinese services is that it's very slow to load data from outside of China, which will impact timed games a lot.

    On another side you have Yandex that provides data for Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan and more Russia and it's not that slow so if there is some API that could be another possibility.
    KillerMapper
  • If Geoguessr were to integrate another service, it would require massive changes to the map creator. It's already sometimes difficult to get the exact location you want. If there's multiple maps on top of each other, it could be chaos. These other companies also probably don't have the same copyright policies as Google. In addition, spreading to multiple services would make us more vulnerable to service disruptions. The Chinese government also does some strange things with coordinates

    That being said, having China on here properly would be really cool.
    JayRS152
  • Thanks for the feedback guys! As you've guessed this could be quite difficult technically and also pose a few possible problems license-wise (by for example mixing different map/streetview providers). But, it would also be really nice to be able to create Chinese maps :). We'll have to investigate this further before we make any decisions, but it would be nice as a goal for the longer term!

    Regards,
    Anton
  • Hi. Any progress? I can imagine that a mash-up with Baidu (or Tencent?) presents considerable difficulties, but there isn't likely to ever be any alternative since Google is never going to have SV there. bw
    Dadge City
  • Just checkin in to see how progress on this is going? My roommate is from China and seems interested in playing Chinese maps, but photospheres are unreliable at best. Hopefully this can be done before the end of the school year
    Braden Richards
  • Hi,

    There is no progress in regards to this.

    KR
    Filip
  • In the community an attempt to make a game using Baidu maps was made. The result is quite clear: not worth it. The API is not easily accessible from outside China, the picture quality is not that great and the loading times way too long. Just forget about it.

    As for Yandex another attempt was made and it works well. A script was done to inject Yandex maps in GeoGuessr: https://openuserjs.org/scripts/kommu/Geoguessr_Yandex_Plugin (it's a bit complicated to run as it needs an API key: https://shorturl.at/bhzOX). This could be implemented into the game.
    Mapper
  • Hi, just a moment ago I found a movable Chinese map that contains over 1000 locations, https://www.geoguessr.com/maps/5b243ab9cead176c3828ff68. Also I roughly selected Mainland China and found 639 locations: https://www.geoguessr.com/maps/616f802263c4cb00013f3554
    I played one round and they are all movable. I wonder whether there will be an official map of China like that of India(no official street view, but a lot of tourist spots).
    Jason Wang

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