The latest version of Microsoft Flight Simulator has recently launched to much fanfare. The technology used to map out the entire world for a simulated flying experience is impressive and the scale is immense. The immense scale can lead to some problems, however, as we’ve seen with a comically large 212 floor tall skyscraper popping up in Melbourne, Australia.
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If you buy the game’s physical format it comes in 10 DVDs, which allows you to explore the whole world which has been recreated using satellite imagery and 3D rendering technology. Of course, there is no such tall skyscraper in Australia, so how did it happen in-game? Strangely, due to minor typo.
When developer Asobo Studio built its detailed recreation of the globe, they pulled data from OpenStreetMap. This is a platform which offers a free map of the world to which anyone can contribute. Unfortunately, one of those contributions to the open platform was an error.
About a year ago a user named “nathanwright120” added a tag that said this one building in Melbourne had 212 floors instead of two. Seeing as this user has made many contributions to the map and they have been accurate, it can be concluded that this was a simple error and not an attempt to mislead anyone (although, who would believe such a building exists?). The error was corrected by OpenStreetMap soon thereafter, but at that point the data had already been sold to the developers of the game and would make its way into Microsoft Flight Simulator.
At the time of writing there hasn’t been a software patch released to fix the error and Microsoft hasn’t commented on a potential incoming fix. As Microsoft Flight Simulator strives for as much realism as possible, we’re sure it will be removed from this virtual world soon rather than later, though.
