Yahoo Finance Microsoft Flight Simulator's mysterious Melbourne 212-storey skyscraper: is it a tower, is it a pole, is it a typo?
A typo is to blame for a mysterious, monolithic 212-storey tower in Melbourne’s northern suburbs appearing in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020.
The massive flight simulator game launched this week allows users to explore most of the world, including Australia, at a time when people cannot do much travelling.
Melbourne itself remains in stage-four lockdown with the Covid-19 pandemic restricting travel to no more than 5km from home.
Several users began noticing a giant 212-storey tower of a house standing out on its own, out and above everything else, in the northern Melbourne suburb of Fawkner. One that doesn’t exist in the real Melbourne on that scale.
In Microsoft Flight Simulator a bizarrely eldritch, impossibly narrow skyscraper pierces the skies of Melbourne's North like a suburban Australian version of Half-Life 2's Citadel, and I am -all for it- pic.twitter.com/6AH4xgIAWg
— Alexander Muscat (@alexandermuscat) August 19, 2020
One Twitter user, Liam O, tracked down what had led to this giant residential landmark appearing in an otherwise unassuming suburb.
Mapping companies, including Google and Microsoft’s Bing Maps, use data from the open and collaborative mapping platform Openstreetmaps in their maps, and the developers of Flight Simulator, Asobo, pulled data from Bing Maps for the open world of the game.
You can land on it!!!
(It only took me 38 tries) pic.twitter.com/xS7owaTGJw— Conor O'Kane (@conorokane) August 19, 2020
A user on Openstreetmaps named nathanwright120 appears to have, accidentally, entered in the height of the Fawkner home as 212 storeys, rather than just two.
The edit was fixed by another user but not before Flight Simulator’s developers had pulled the data from Openstreetmaps in the construction of its world, leading to a home with more than double the number of floors of Melbourne’s Eureka tower.
Given the sheer size of the game, mistakes of this kind are likely to occur, and will no doubt continue to be discovered by users in the coming weeks and months.
Other hiccups include an unusual looking Sydney Harbour Bridge and a Buckingham Palace that more resembles an office block.
Seriously @MSFSofficial ?? You're going to release a world wide game and NOT include the Sydney Harbour Bridge?#FlightSimulator pic.twitter.com/XENQiUQXyS
— Jez (@jezkerwin) August 18, 2020
Apparently, the new Microsoft flight sim has used AI to map the entire world. But it's not done it all that great, and turned Buckingham Palace into a generic 90s office block. https://t.co/hgJnGmauPI pic.twitter.com/KybFG7XOf9
— Oli Mould (@olimould) August 18, 2020
Guardian Australia has sought comment from Microsoft Australia.
Microsoft told Australian Aviation the developers would continually refine the game, and parts of it had been specifically developed to look like their real-life counterparts, including Sydney airport.
