It was the year 2022, when Ayvri announced to be discontinued. At the time, I relied heavily on Ayvri for the videos of my YouTube Channel SteppenwolfX. So I tried to do somehting about it and tried, how hard it was to develop something similar myself.

The first prototype took me just around 100 hours. And as I quite enjoyed doing it and because I always had the dream of running my own web platform, I created a user interface, login system, logo and everything else around it. And all this stuff consumed so much more time, than I expected.

But I finally managed to finish a first working version where users were able to create their accounts. And they actually did! For some time, I just let it fly below the radar, just to see what happens. It was around this time, that I started realizing the problem width expensive map tiles.

Map tiles are little squares, which are part of a map. Usually, it's 256 x 256 pixels, one for each utilized coordinate and zoom level. When you load the Ogoy player, around 300-400 such tiles are being loaded instantly, even more if you move or turn around. And there are providers for such map tiles who offer them at a price, which is usually between 0.05 and 0.6 Euros/Dollars or whatever per 1000 requests. They never allow me to cache those map tiles at my own server. Also, hosting my own map tile server is not really feasable for satellite imagery, as the raw data is far too expensive to license.

So, I needed to look for some income. I was thinking back and forth around various options on how to design the pricing. I implemented a first version, but then again deleted parts of it, just to do it slightly different. All these thoughts around how to do it and the actual implementation took me even more time than what I did before. Also, because at the same time, I implemented a lot more features.

I created the split screen mode, implemented private scenes, tested different map representations and much more. And then, I had to draw a line to make a big release. With a video on my YouTube Channel. Which released at December 14, 2023. And from that day on, a lot has changed.

I was overwhelmed by the amount of new users who found their way to Ogoy. The release video was one of my most successful video releases of the channel at the time. And there were acutally people paying to use the premium features of Ogoy! This was my dream - to run a platform, that was actually used by actual people! But with all that new usage, the cost for map tiles also went up.

Some time has passed and I keep improving Ogoy. With the active subscriptions, I'm able to pay the bills for now, but most of the time I spent and am going to spend to develop and improve Ogoy remains unpaid.

I have a lot of ideas on where Ogoy could go in the future. But I don't know which will work out and how much time I will be able to spend on it, so I won't make any promises. But I will try to keep improving it and adding new features as much as I can. And if you have any suggestions, please let me know!