Comment by SamPatt

Thanks. I also love watching the pros play.

>One thing I'm curious about - in high level play, how much of the meta involves knowing characteristics about the photography/equipment/etc. that Google used when they shot it?

The photography matters a great deal - they're categorized into "Generations" of coverage. Gen 2 is low resolution, Gen 3 is pretty good but has a distinct car blur, Gen 4 is highest quality. Each country tends to have only one or two categories of coverage, and some are so distinct you can immediately know a location based solely on that (India is the best example here).

You're asking about photography and equipment, and that's a big part of it, but there's a huge amount other 'meta' information too.

It is somewhat dependent on game mode. There are three games modes:

1. Moving - You can move around freely 2. No Move - You can't move but you can pan the camera around and zoom 3. NMPZ - No Move, No Pan, No Zoom

In Moving and No Move you have all the meta information available to you, because you can look down at the car and up at the sky and zoom in to see details.

This can't be overstated. Much of the data is about the car itself. I have an entire flashcard section dedicated only to car blur alone, here's a sample:

https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/sampatt/media@main/posts/2025-04...

And another only on antennas:

https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/sampatt/media@main/posts/2025-04...

You get the idea. The real pros will go much further. All Google Street View images have a copyright year somewhere in the image. They memorize what years certain countries were covered and match it to the images to help narrow down possibilities.

It's all about narrowing down possibilities based on each additional piece of information. The pros have seen so much and memorized so much that it looks like cheating to an outsider, but they just are able to extract information that most people wouldn't even know exists.

NMPZ is a bit different because you have substantially less information. Little to no car meta, harder to check copyright, and of course without zooming or panning you just have less information. That's why a lot of pros (like Zi8gzag) really hang their hat on NMPZ play, because it's a better test of skill.