GODSIGH/COMPARISON.md

GODSIGH vs. the open-sourced God's Eye View

2026-08-25 — Bilawal Sidhu open-sourced the real God's Eye View (vendored here at gods-eye-view-main/, gitignored). GODSIGH was our guess at it, built from the YouTube videos alone. This is the honest side-by-side, and the record of what we ported in Wave 4.

Architecture — two different bets

	GODSIGH (ours)	God's Eye View (theirs)
Size	~2,400 lines, 12 modules	~300 modules + per-module test files
Build	none — ES modules + 2 CDN globals	Vite, Node 24/26 enforced
Globe	CARTO dark / EOX Sentinel-2 raster (keyless)	Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles (metered 🔴 key required)
Entry fee	$0, zero keys	Google Maps key mandatory; OpenAI key for voice
Server	stdlib serve.py proxy + shared OpenSky cache	Vite dev server + key-brokering proxies, rate limits
Testing	none	huge .test.mjs suite + QA screenshot scripts
Focus	one theater, one timeline (Persian Gulf OSINT, scrubbable ±6h)	the whole planet as a place (photoreal, cinematic, voice-driven)

The big divergence: we guessed "OSINT analysis console" (time scrubbing, replay, choke points, dark vessels); the real one is an "experience" (cockpit rides, voice agent, sensor skins, cinematic scenes). Their README even concedes our corner: "the moment you try to go back in time… the data gets expensive" — our timeline/replay/record.py stack is the thing they explicitly didn't build.

Feature matrix

Feature	Theirs	Ours before	Ours now (Wave 4)
Live aircraft (OpenSky + adsb.lol)	✅	✅	✅
Military ADS-B	✅	✅	✅
Satellites (SGP4)	~840 + Starlink chip	~97 curated recon/EO	unchanged (curated > bulk for our theater)
Earthquakes / fires / launches	✅	✅ (+GDACS, NWS, RFS they lack)	✅
Timeline scrub + aircraft replay	❌	✅	✅ — still our moat
Demo ship analytics (AIS-gap, toll route)	live AIS only	✅	✅
Smooth motion between polls	✅ interpolation	❌ planes teleported every 90 s	✅ dead reckoning, aircraft + military
Sensor styles (NVG/FLIR/CRT GLSL)	✅ 6 styles + uniforms	❌	✅ 3 compact post-process styles, keys 1–4, in share links
Submarine cables	✅ bundled TeleGeography	❌	✅ 712 cables + 1,917 landings
Datacenters / dams	✅ bundled OSM	❌	✅ 4,351 + 704 as registry layers
Voice agent (28 tools)	✅ OpenAI Realtime 🔴	❌	skipped — needs paid key, against our zero-key rule
Cockpit / contacts / 3D hangar	✅	❌	skipped — built on Google 3D tiles 🔴
CCTV projected into 3D	✅	❌	skipped — same reason; flat raster has nothing to project onto
Traffic (TomTom), radio tuner, bikeshare	✅	❌	skipped/deferred — off-theater or key-gated
Detection overlay / military HUD	✅	❌	skipped — cosmetic without their photoreal globe

What Wave 4 ported (all keyless, no build step)

1. Submarine cables — their bundled TeleGeography GeoJSON, rendered by a new js/layers/cables.js. © TeleGeography, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 — non-commercial only, see assets/README.md.
2. Datacenters + dams — their OSM/Open Infrastructure Map snapshots, collapsed to centroid points and dropped into the layer registry as two data entries (ODbL, attributed). Off by default.
3. Sensor styles — NVG / FLIR-Ironbow / CRT as Cesium PostProcessStage GLSL in js/styles.js, compacted from their style system. Hotkeys 1–4; serialized into share links as s=.
4. Smooth motion — their "render behind, interpolate" idea, done the lazy way: lib.deadReckon() advances every billboard along its reported course at 10 Hz between polls, live-only, capped at 5 min extrapolation.

Worth stealing later

• Trace-history backfill — click a military contact, see its last ~24 h as 3D loops. Feasible keyless via OpenSky /tracks through serve.py.
• First-run missions — their staged "first five minutes" onboarding card.
• Their test culture — per-module .test.mjs; ours has none.
• Radio layer — Radio Browser API is keyless and geolocated; audio-in- InfoBox needs a spike.
• Natural Earth named-region polygons (public domain) if we ever want "outline the Strait of Hormuz"-style annotation.