Remember when the ArmA 3 devs were jailed for espionage in Greece because they were accused of spying on the military, as they were taking photographs of a Greek island that was going to be used for the game's map? The photographs included pictures of an airbase.  That was like these stories but everything is opposite.,(reply>), @Kvass Greek military airports are not visible from Google maps, they are full of unidentifiable pixels,(reply>), @CMTechnica they aren't that useful really, as inless they are detail Photos, they don't contain infos on a building's use, or positions and distances.<br><br>They're not useful for planning an airstrike either, as they are not from the same perspective as a strike pilot, therefore they don't help with target ID.,(reply>), To clarify some things, those devs had a permit to take pictures in order to make their game. However, instead of going to the base, explaining what they were doing, maybe get a soldier to accompany them, they just showed up and started taking pictures, which the base personnel found suspicious.<br>The best part of it is that Bohemia got so butthurt over the incident they changed the story of the game just to dunk on the greek army.,(reply>), @Kvass The in game map (Altis) is a recreation of the real world Greek Island of Lemnos.  As there is a whole game studio that needs to work on this map the devs had two choices:<br>1. pay for the entire studio to fly to Greece and tour the island first hand so they know what they are recreating and hope they can memorize all those details for later when they get back to the studio and start making the map or<br>2. Send a couple of guys to take photos of the island and it's landmarks so the studio can use the pictures as a reference when building the map.<br>As the game has a focus on realism not only is the terrain recreated faithfully but if you know how to navigate using the stars you can do so. In fact if you set the in game date and time to the current date and time and went to Lemnos the star pattern would be identical in the game as what you would see when you look up.<br>It's generally standard practice for game devs to scout locations and take pictures to use as art references later so it should be considered unusual if they did not get reference photographs.<br>I also wanted to see if there even was a street view of the island and it turns out Google hasn't done so yet," there are only a few sporadic 360 degree view shots taken by citizens and uploaded to Google and were only taken years after release.<br>Someone did do a comparison video of real life to the game if you are interested in how close they matched it:<br><a href=""https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nERT93wMjoY"">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nERT93wMjoY</a>",(reply>), @Kvass Most military facilities are blurred or outright blank on google maps.