Microsoft Flight Simulator has some great bugs, glitches, and mountainous obelisks

Microsoft Flight Simulator usually produces some fantastic realism, but there is the strange occasion where things go hilariously wrong. PC players in simulated planes have scolded the world this week and have discovered some pretty amusing glitches.

The biggest discovery is a giant mountain-top obelisk in Melbourne, Australia. The unusually tall building does not exist in real life, but Bing Maps thinks a giant obelisk dominates the skies of north Melbourne. Microsoft Flight Simulator uses Microsoft’s Bing Maps technology – streams data directly from two petabytes of cloud storage – so it’s likely that this particular glitch is based on incorrect Bing Maps data.

Some Flight Simulator players have been visit the obelisk at midnight, envious of getting some pictures of the gigantic structure before it was inexorably removed.

Giant obelisks are not the only things that go wrong Microsoft Flight Simulator. The game uses Azure-driven procedural generation technology to fill all the gaps in Bing Maps data. Landmarks and bridges cannot be produced with AI, so they must be built by hand. That makes some parts of cities look a little strange when you look too close.

kraven420 (Reddit)

Flight Simulator players discovered that Buckingham Palace, the official residence in London of the British monarchs, had been converted into an office building. Likewise, the Washington Monument in Washington DC has also been transformed into a narrow skyscraper.

On the west coast, the game seems to wrestle with palm trees lining the streets of southern California. In Flight Simulator they have transformed into strange angle structures that jump out of the ground like prehistoric shark teeth.

Flight Simulator players have stumbled over other places where objects are displayed rude, including a bridge in Portland where trucks are glued to the sides.

Some of the glitches could be down to the data streaming settings that players choose Flight Simulatorhowever. One player discovered that TIAA Bank Field in Jacksonville, Florida looks like it’s full of grass with a sunken office building in the middle of the stadium.

We visited the TIAA Bank Field this morning, and it gave in all its glory with all the data streaming settings enabled. It’s unlikely that Asobo Studio, the developers behind it Microsoft Flight Simulator, fix the stadium in less than 24 hours. Some of the visual glitches that people experience may be related to internet connection with the stream data used for power Flight Simulator, or simply because players do not enable the full data download once the game is configured.

The glitches are more amusing than they are game breaking, and you will probably not notice any of the inaccuracies unless you are flying low or you know how many buildings are meant to be seen in a particular city or area. I have spent hours on flights in the world I have never been to Microsoft Flight Simulator. It’s still a stunningly realistic virtual version of our planet, even as some giant obelisks create some virtual air traffic across Australia.