When you try to map the world, you find some weird things. A Redditor recently discovered a bizarre skyscraper jutting out of the Italian countryside, casting long shadows onto the rolling fields of bucolic bliss. What gives? Well, as it turns out, Microsoft Flight Simulator's world-mapping technology is quite impressive, but it can also come along with some minor mistakes.
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
A similar monolith was discovered in Melbourne, Australia. According to Twitter user @liamosaur (embedded below), these mistakes are due to typos in OpenStreetMap, the technology that Microsoft Flight Simulator uses for its mapping technology. Apparently, a user typed that their building has 212 floors instead of 2, which led to the creation of the thin monstrosity.
The error was later corrected by another @openstreetmap user, BUT, in the interim, Microsoft took an export of the data and used it to build Flight Simulator 2020. The result... this incredible monolith (2/2) pic.twitter.com/wXKBK03Gcd
— Liam O 🦆 (@liamosaur) August 20, 2020
That's not the only strange sight that you might find in the game. Flight Sim accidentally turned Buckingham Palace into a nondescript block of offices, and also reduced Edinburgh Castle to a number of apartment buildings. As the game gets updated, some of these oddities and mistakes might get fixed, but I hope that the obelisks stay, a digital reminder of how important a typo can be.
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