Options

1. Setting the units of measure
2. Setting the language
3. Terrain exaggeration
4. New feature animation

Setting the units of measure

The plugin's status bar displays the altitude of a point under the cursor, as well as the altitude from which the Earth is being viewed; the scale legend displays the current map scale. To specify whether these values should be displayed in imperial units (feet and miles) or metric units (meters and kilometers), call GEOptions.setUnitsFeetMiles():

ge.getOptions().setStatusBarVisibility(true);
ge.getOptions().setScaleLegendVisibility(true);
ge.getOptions().setUnitsFeetMiles(true);

Setting the language

The plugin's language can be set in a few different ways:

• As an option to google.load()
• With google.earth.setLanguage()
• As an option to google.earth.createInstance()

Regardless of how it's set, the language will apply to road and border labels in the plugin, the Terms of Use text, the status bar, and any error messages.

Supported language codes are listed in the Google Maps API Coverage document. Note that we often update the languages that we support, so this list may not be exhaustive.

google.load()

A language code can be passed as an option to google.load():

google.load('earth', '1', { 'language': 'pt' , 'other_params':'sensor=true_or_false'});

This behaves as if setLanguage() is called immediately after the API is loaded. It can be overridden by calling setLanguage() later, before instantiating the plugin, or by specifying a language in createInstance().

google.earth.setLanguage()

A language code can be specified with google.earth.setLanguage(). The value set with this method will apply to any new instances of the plugin; it will not affect any existing instances.

function init() {
  google.earth.setLanguage('pt');
  google.earth.createInstance('map3d', initCB, failureCB);
}

This will affect any language option passed to google.load().

google.earth.createInstance()

The language code can be passed as an option to google.earth.createInstance(), as follows:

google.earth.createInstance('map3d', initCB, failureCB, { 'language': 'pt' });

This will override setLanguage() and any language option passed to google.load().

Terrain exaggeration

If your application could benefit from a more dramatic presentation of terrain, you can set an altitude multiplier with GEOptions.setTerrainExaggeration(). You can specify a value from 1.0 to 3.0, which is multiplied with the altitude value for all points on the globe. Note that this affects the altitude values displayed in the status bar as well as those returned from getView(), etc.

 
The same viewpoint with terrain exaggeration set to 1.0 (left) and 2.0 (right).

Sample: http://developers.google.com/earth/documentation/samples/terrainexaggeration_example.html

ge.getLayerRoot().enableLayerById(ge.LAYER_TERRAIN, true);
ge.getOptions().setTerrainExaggeration(2.2);

Values outside of the allowed range will be clipped to the closest allowable value.

New feature animation

When a new feature is added to the Google Earth Plugin, the default behavior is to animate its appearance with a slight change of scale. To turn off this behavior, call GEOptions.setFadeInOutEnabled():

ge.getOptions().setFadeInOutEnabled(false);