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Flight Simulator: a student typed a database wrong and caused a ridiculous building that went viral

2020-08-22T15:25:15.288Z


Microsoft's game uses collaborative maps. And it is full of "glitches" (programming errors).


08/22/2020 - 12:01

  • ClarĂ­n.com
  • Technology

A line of code misplaced in programming and glitches (errors) appear. A typo ( typo ) and a 2-story building becomes one of 200. With the release of the 2020 version of Flight Simulator , which features a map that is the entire globe, users began to identify bugs.

In this case, a typo by a young Australian student when saving the data in an open source map database was responsible for the appearance in the Microsoft Flight Simulator flight simulation game of a huge skyscraper of more than 200 floors that it does not exist in reality, in the airspace of Melbourne , Australia. And if it existed, it would look very strange .

Microsoft Flight Simulator, released this week, has detailed more than 1.5 billion buildings, two billion trees, mountains, routes and rivers to recreate the landscapes in detail, as well as dynamic weather with changes in real time.

The key to the error is that, as the video game was created from two petabytes of satellite image data to reproduce the entire planet from the air, it also uses data from Bing Maps and other sources, including the collaborative mapping platforms.

The erroneous data was introduced by a then Australian university student, Nathan Wright, while doing academic work with the map platform.

Using one of these tools, Open Street Maps, generated a bug that affected players flying over the Australian city of Melbourne - an extremely slim-shaped , 212-story skyscraper nestled in the middle of the low-rise suburb of Faukner.

This is not a real building, but rather the cause of a misprint in the information in one of the versions of Open Street Maps used by the game to represent residential buildings in 3D.

As the Twitter user @liamosaur warned, in previous versions of the collaborative map platform, a user wrongly filled in the data for one of the buildings and instead of two floors, wrote 212, which explains its height and shape .

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

This bug was fixed by later users of Open Street Maps, but it was present in the version used by Microsoft to develop Flight Simulator.

A very error prone game

The problem, which at the same time is the virtue of this edition of Flight Simulator, is that the map is really immense: the entire world.

By the artificial intelligence system that it uses to recreate the emblematic buildings, users detected that, for example, Buckingham Palace in London is transformed into a traditional building:

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 Mold (@olimould) August 18, 2020

Some other strange situations that captured users:

Nice Microsoft Flight Simulator glitch examples in this article by @bucksexington

My favorite is this pair where the bridges of London are underwater, but the good people of London just keep driving across them.https: //t.co/Odw9ZPMlHN pic.twitter. com / vhPnnSqwn7

- Janelle Shane (@JanelleCShane) August 20, 2020

Microsoft Flight Simulator AI includes traffic patterns, but gets confused sometimes about where to put the cars vertically.

People commenting on thallada's video have pointed out this is a building in Boston that normally has a road tunneling through it.https: //t.co/OK05VPSg3e pic.twitter.com/Qt0etkGChq

- Janelle Shane (@JanelleCShane) August 20, 2020

đź”´ ARRIVAL Arrival
of the flight AirBarolo da Milano, Gate4 grazie. pic.twitter.com/1ZKX7nkc4h

- Aeroporto Internazionale di Acicatena (@APTAcicatena) August 17, 2020

TIAA Bank Field, American football stadium, in Jacksonville: transformed into offices. Photo Microsoft Flight Simulator

Source: clarin

All tech articles on 2020-08-22

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