HACK THE PLANET

MICROSOFT FLIGHT SIMULATOR modders imagining a better Earth

- Alex Spencer

Microsoft Flight Simulator’s version of Earth is a marvel. Satellite data from Bing Maps (hey, someone’s got to use it) interpreted by Microsoft’s Azure AI platform creates an approximation of our planet, all 200 million square miles of it. The result is a feat of engineering to rival the real-life aircraft you fly over it – an evolutionary leap from Google Earth, exactly the world tourism simulator we all need right now. Except when it’s not.

Drop beneath the clouds, and you may notice the generic office buildings that replaced iconic landmarks such as the Washington Monument and Buckingham Palace. Or the Brazilian airfield swallowed by a mile-deep chasm. Or the 2,000-foot monolith piercing the skies of Melbourne, apparently the result of a typo in OpenStreetMap, a source that Bing Maps itself pulls data from.

These (often hilarious) errors grabbed headlines and became in-game tourist attractions in their own right. But they’re not the only gaps on Flight Sim’s globe, as anyone who’s discovered a flat texture where their home town should be will tell you. “It’s great outside of cities, where all you need is rather rough heightmap and ground textures with decent resolution, and satellite images are enough,” says Ilya Perapechka, a software engineer and a key part of the Flight Sim community on Reddit, where he goes by the username ‘Jonahex111’.

When it comes to those urban centres, much more detail is required.