M
icrosoft 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. Flight Sim uses 3D-scanned
photogrammetry where possible – but Bing’s library only
covers around 400 cities, most of them located in the
USA. “For all the other cities, towns and villages in the
world, 3D models of buildings are automatically generated
by neural algorithms developed by Blackshark.ai. This is
better than nothing, but far from good.”
Living in Minsk, this is something that Perapechka
knows all too well. “There is no photogrammetry for my
country ... and the quality of autogenerated buildings is
quite poor,” he says. “But I was ready for it. The real
disappointment was when I flew to London.” It’s not just
the Queen’s gaff that gets a rough deal there – many of the
capital’s bridges are submerged in the Thames, while the
Gherkin, a skyscraper that looks like the result of
procedural generation IRL, is entirely absent.
For a location as frequently visited as this, you’ve got
options. On launch day there was already a London city
pack available for purchase from Orbx, which offers
handcrafted versions of the famous skyline.
Microsoft is gradually expanding on its work with free
updates that take on one country, and a few of its most
prominent cities and landmarks, at a time. But what aboutThe London skyline,
as furnished by
Orbx’s premium
city pack.How to
If you fancy
trying out some
of these
creations
yourself,
flightsim.to is
the place to
start. Its scenery
repository is
already over
1,000 packs
strong – just
pick the one you
want, download
and unzip into
the game’s
Community
folder. Finding
that folder this is
the trickiest part
of the process.
You can find
plenty of guides
online, but for
me, the folder
was inexplicably
on the top level
of my hard drive.HACK THE PLANET
MICROSOFT FLIGHT SIMULATOR modders imagining a better Earth
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