212-Story Building in Melbourne
August 20, 2020 6:24 AM   Subscribe

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... Apparently this building can be traced back to a typo in OpenStreetMap.

Coincidentally, my (12-year-old) son and I were discussing crowdsourcing last night:

son: Teachers HATE Wikipedia!
me: Really?
son: Yes. They's rather you use some old website that hasn't been updated since 2014 for research.
me: Well I have a bunch of friends who worked at Encyclopedia Britannica. They hated Wikipedia before anyone.
son: I can see that

...and scene.
posted by ba (47 comments total) 31 users marked this as a favorite
 
Love it. That's some proper SCP shit right there.
posted by adrianhon at 6:36 AM on August 20, 2020 [6 favorites]


Just because it's 2020, it might be a good idea to make sure that it's not actually, suddenly there.
posted by theodolite at 6:56 AM on August 20, 2020 [47 favorites]


Apparently this building can be traced back to a typo in OpenStreetMap.

The typo, btw, was listing a two-storey was recently building as 212. I was listening to an archived episode of The Museum of Curiosity. One guest mentioned a difficulty with the electronic version of a recipe book, where the listing calling for “10 oz” of raisins was rendered as “1002 raisins.”
posted by ricochet biscuit at 7:00 AM on August 20, 2020 [22 favorites]


The reply comments are pretty great
And then we all realise that these towers start appearing in esoteric but significant positions across the world.
...
What if the skyscraper is really there but our human senses are too limited to see it?
But our algorythms have outpaced our senses and can see the truth that we are not ready to see?
...
The dark tower lorded over the lands, guiding humanity during its childhood. Some say it fell from the stars and some say it always was.
It’s shadow casts a long veil, reaching into the dreams of those shrouded by it. The dreamers can hear it calling to them.
It is awakening.
Rami Ismail is super excited about the new Flight Simulator, btw. Apparently it's really achieved something new with its massive use of real world data. Not just OSM (and its typos) but Bing's enormous aerial imagery archive, realistic terrain, land cover, etc.
It creates a sort of second-level sondering - instead of wondering what people's lives are like in the houses below, you wonder what the houses look like in real life - and then what the lives of the people that presumably live in there are like. I can stare at it forever.
This is achieved through a remarkable mix of photogrammetry, the cloud, AI generation, literally all of Bing, and ton of clever modeling. It's garnished with dozens of live partnerships with weather data, flight data, and tons more. The developer in me is impossibly impressed.
posted by Nelson at 7:04 AM on August 20, 2020 [5 favorites]


Has anyone checked the Azores to see if it goes all the way through the planet?
posted by oulipian at 7:04 AM on August 20, 2020 [9 favorites]


Ironically, my comment in a typo story got mangled in some cut and paste, and then a phone call diverted me until after the edit window expired. Ahem:
The typo, btw, was listing a two-storey was as 212. I was recently listening to an archived episode of The Museum of Curiosity. One guest mentioned a difficulty with the electronic version of a recipe book, where the listing calling for “10 oz” of raisins was rendered as “1002 raisins.”
posted by ricochet biscuit at 7:18 AM on August 20, 2020 [2 favorites]


Man, between this and Star Wars: Squadrons (Previously self-link)… maybe it's time I finally replaced by ~15-year-old joystick.
And got an Oculus \m/
posted by CheesesOfBrazil at 7:29 AM on August 20, 2020 [1 favorite]


guys i think this flight simulator is also socialist
posted by Foci for Analysis at 7:52 AM on August 20, 2020 [4 favorites]


That "socialist" link mentions that the Gherkin is no-where to be found in the game. It reminds me that Watch Dogs, a game that otherwise has a pretty faithful depiction of Chicago, has a certain famous sculpture replaced by some sort of stand-in.

I'm assuming this has to do with Kapoor being the art world's greatest living asshole. And I wonder if there's something similar going on with the Gherkin.
posted by cardioid at 8:01 AM on August 20, 2020 [2 favorites]


Oh, that's just The Oldest House
posted by FirstMateKate at 8:01 AM on August 20, 2020 [6 favorites]


And I wonder if there's something similar going on with the Gherkin.

London isn’t one of the official launch cities, so it’s still completely auto generated based on map and terrain data. Heathrow comes with a paid upgrade, so perhaps that also gets you the cleaned up London buildings, but I read somewhere that London is coming later.
posted by sideshow at 8:09 AM on August 20, 2020


In comparison, Burj Khalifa has 163 floors.
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 8:18 AM on August 20, 2020 [1 favorite]


Has some enterprising Melburnian made a petition to build this irl because get on that
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 8:21 AM on August 20, 2020 [1 favorite]


I kind of want to read a xkcd what-if about this building, because I suspect it'd be bad news one way or another.
posted by Foosnark at 8:23 AM on August 20, 2020 [5 favorites]


I believe there's a 3rd-party expansion pack that includes the Gherkin and the other London buildings you would expect to see, I saw someone showing it off on YouTube.
posted by BungaDunga at 8:24 AM on August 20, 2020


Just because it's 2020, it might be a good idea to make sure that it's not actually, suddenly there.

THE MACHINE KNOWS!
posted by Naberius at 8:24 AM on August 20, 2020


I'm most amused by the Washington MonumentOffice Tower.
posted by ckape at 8:26 AM on August 20, 2020 [2 favorites]


G’day
G’day to City 17 ya cunts
You fuckin chose or have been chosen to relocate down ‘ere
I reckoned City 17 was so bonzer I said right mate, let's have a barbie right ‘ere in the big smoke provided by our offsider cobbers
And you know what, City 17's a beaut of a home town, so whether you're vegging out or you're a drongo dero, g'day to City 17. No worries mate.
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 8:32 AM on August 20, 2020 [6 favorites]


...maybe it's time I finally replaced by ~15-year-old joystick.
And got an Oculus \m/


Um...maybe not?
posted by Thorzdad at 8:32 AM on August 20, 2020 [3 favorites]


Crowd-sourcing map QA. Google's "local guides" thing was cool, but MS has the pro move here, monetizing the privilege of providing feedback and making error corrections.
posted by bonehead at 8:41 AM on August 20, 2020 [2 favorites]


Ok, MSFS is calling them "photogrammetry" cities, and based on this unofficial list, there are 312 of them right now, with more coming later. Melbourne and London aren't on the list.

But, my hometown is (Santa Clarita, CA, a city in northern Los Angeles County), and I'm guessing some places are more "photogrammetry" than others. While the Santa Clara river does flow through town on it's way to Ventura,CA and after that the Pacific Ocean, there is a 100 year flood worth of water in it. In fact, the only time it looked like that in my lifetime, the water table got so high that many of my friends had water coming up through their lawns and into their homes.

But, they made an effort. Here's me after attempting to crash into my best friends house (I missed and landed across the street). You can see the "Canyon" painted on our high school gym (Go Canyon Cowboys! Boo Hart Indians!) While they got the flood control channel between the school and house kinda right, you can tell I'm definitely not crashed into what is recognizable as an actual building.

I also crashed into my current home in Orange, CA, (which isn't on the list), and it looked about the same level of detail. Although I'm directly on the final approach to John Wayne/Orange County (KSNA), so maybe they put in some extra effort.
posted by sideshow at 8:44 AM on August 20, 2020 [2 favorites]


A collection of glitches on The Verge, it looks like it would be a lot of fun finding these weird issues... I'm quite taken by the evil monolith palm trees infesting the virtual world.
posted by rambling wanderlust at 9:02 AM on August 20, 2020 [2 favorites]


guys i think this flight simulator is also socialist

It's obviously an artefact from a parallel universe in which Jeremy Corbyn became Prime Minister and, after fending off a military coup from the gammon, declared the People's Republic of Britain.
posted by acb at 9:14 AM on August 20, 2020


Why fix the game, when we can fix the world? Build the monolith.
posted by MattWPBS at 9:29 AM on August 20, 2020 [11 favorites]


Man I wish I had a computer that could run this game. Pretty sure mine would burst into flames if it tried.
posted by showbiz_liz at 9:41 AM on August 20, 2020


I love this. I love things like this. I love a hyper realistic and accurate game with oddities that can be discovered.
posted by meese at 9:54 AM on August 20, 2020


Also, in case you are wondering what part of the Earth has the most eyes on it in-game, it's whatever island Epstein had a house on. I've seen pictures of literally dozens of planes landed on it and flying around the immediate, since multiplayer mode allows you to see other players flying around.
posted by sideshow at 10:09 AM on August 20, 2020 [5 favorites]


the listing calling for “10 oz” of raisins was rendered as “1002 raisins.”

The most beautiful thing about this is it's not even wrong by enough to necessarily ruin the recipe - apparently it's about 60 raisins to the ounce, so 1002 raisins is 16 oz. Though I suppose counting out 1002 raisins would ruin the process of cooking by making it extremely tedious. But the result will probably be fine.
posted by aubilenon at 11:01 AM on August 20, 2020 [10 favorites]


Has some enterprising Melburnian made a petition to build this irl because get on that

Last year the United Way of Toronto produced a campaign to raise awareness of poverty in the city, depicting the result if all 116,000 or so Torontonians below the poverty line lived in a single building. (For scale, the CN Tower, visible in the images, is 553 metres or 1815 ft.) There was also an augmented reality app where you could examine the thing from the street by pointing your phone at where it would theoretically be.

I would say the ratio of comments I saw about poverty in the city to the criticism of how out-of-control developers were and "who would ever want to live there?" and "they're ruining the skyline with all these condos" was approximately the same as the actual Melbourne building to the Flight Simulator version.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 11:06 AM on August 20, 2020 [1 favorite]


The most beautiful thing about this is it's not even wrong by enough to necessarily ruin the recipe - apparently it's about 60 raisins to the ounce, so 1002 raisins is 16 oz. Though I suppose counting out 1002 raisins would ruin the process of cooking by making it extremely tedious. But the result will probably be fine.

Apparently people were laboriously counting out their sultanas and writing her to say, "I've got only 744 raisins -- will that be all right?"
posted by ricochet biscuit at 11:08 AM on August 20, 2020 [3 favorites]


I've seen folks on Twitter using it to fly to their friends houses, crash the plane into the house, take a screen shot an message them with "tried to stop by, you weren't home."

I haven't played a Flight Simulator game since the 90s, I'm wondering if Now Is the Time.

(it was buggy as hell and crashed constantly but was cool when it worked)
posted by emjaybee at 11:57 AM on August 20, 2020


I wonder how detailed they get with the OSM data. Some cities have individual water fountains mapped out.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 12:27 PM on August 20, 2020 [1 favorite]


Man I wish I had a computer that could run this game. Pretty sure mine would burst into flames if it tried.

In any case, you can always play one of the 1980s versions emulated in a web browser.
posted by acb at 12:48 PM on August 20, 2020 [3 favorites]


It's gorgeous.

Reminds me of a Daniel Suarez novel.
posted by doctornemo at 12:55 PM on August 20, 2020 [1 favorite]


The most beautiful thing about this is it's not even wrong by enough to necessarily ruin the recipe - apparently it's about 60 raisins to the ounce, so 1002 raisins is 16 oz.

I am so glad that my set of scales is broken, otherwise I would be fact checking this claim.
posted by ambrosen at 2:08 PM on August 20, 2020 [1 favorite]


All these worlds are yours, except Australia. Attempt no landings there.
posted by ocschwar at 2:26 PM on August 20, 2020 [7 favorites]


Man I wish I had a computer that could run this game. Pretty sure mine would burst into flames if it tried.

It looks like the game will have a long life - the last version came out 14 years ago. So give it some time and you might have a computer, or game system, that can run the game. That's my hope anyway.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 2:37 PM on August 20, 2020 [3 favorites]


That's just the new quarantine building. They figured, hey, instead of having people quarantined all over the city in different buildings, let's just put them in one place.
posted by turbid dahlia at 3:32 PM on August 20, 2020 [1 favorite]


Does anyone know whether MSFS will actually run on an Ivy Bridge i5? The system requirements call for 4xxx series CPU, but I'm not sure whether that's because of performance or a missing instruction on the older CPUs. There are some games that won't run on Sandy Bridge because they use the RDRAND instruction, but work fine on Ivy Bridge because it is implemented in Ivy Bridge.

See, I don't really care about low frame rates. My early experiences with MSFS involved a 386SX that got maybe 10fps. I would enjoy the nostalgia if it merely ran slowly, I just don't want to shell out for the game and then have it not run at all. Given that I can get RDR2 running at 30+ FPS, I kinda doubt MSFS couldn't be made to perform acceptably, but my enjoyment isn't contingent on high frame rates..
posted by wierdo at 3:48 PM on August 20, 2020 [1 favorite]


On December 21st, 1808, the second siege of Zaragoza began. As the bombardment of French artillery broke the southern wall of Monte Terrero, José de Palafox, the 1st Duke of Zaragoza, pleaded with his most trusted advisor for intervention. The man, a shadowy figure known only as Santiago, was rumored to be a practitioner of occult magick. Palafox disregarded his warnings, insisting that any and all means be used to protect the city. The blood ritual which took place that evening did not go as planned. A portal was indeed opened—but not in Zaragoza, on the other side of the world. Tribesmen of the Kulin nation clans were sent fleeing by the thunderous roar and otherworldly lights which emanated from the ground. The tower that emerged there, visible only to shamen, has grown steadily into the sky with each passing year, an inverted shadow of forces draining from one world to the next, a discontinuity whose ultimate consequences have not yet been fully realized.
posted by dephlogisticated at 5:21 PM on August 20, 2020 [2 favorites]


> Reminds me of a Daniel Suarez novel.
Influx!
posted by technodelic at 5:34 PM on August 20, 2020


If you're curious to try it out on your PC, but you don't want to drop $60 to see if it works, maybe check out GamePass Ultimate. There's a "$1 for your first month" trial, which lets you play any of the available games on PC or Xbox, including Flight Simulator.

GamePass Ultimate is $14/month if you decide to keep it, so set yourself a note to cancel if you don't want it.

I tried Flight Simulator for a few hours last night. Never having played a flight sim before, I found a pretty steep learning curve (as to be expected). I started with the little tutorials, which are bite-sized and very useful, although the voiceover work is uh... a little stilted.

My experience improved immensely when I dug out an old Xbox One controller and hooked it up to my computer. I hope to god there aren't any real pilots out there trying to fly actual planes with a mouse and keyboard, because it was terrible.

(Xbox One X controllers have Bluetooth connectivity, btw. If your PC does as well, then you're set. You'll need a USB cable to connect an earlier Xbox One controller to your PC. Windows 10 includes native support for Xbox controllers, so you won't need to download any extra drivers.)

Experience improved even more when I found this article on how to set the controller sensitivity, which helped A LOT.

I managed two successful solo landings in the tutorial Cessna. Then I stepped up to the "real game" and was bewildered by the fancy starter plane they give you. Unable to understand a single thing this newfangled all-digital dashboard was trying to tell me, I flew around trying to find my house, then crashed.

I don't think this game is for me, but I'm curious to try out a few more airports near places I've lived or wanted to visit. I wish you could land and get out and like, walk around. But maybe that's just the quarantine talking.
posted by ErikaB at 9:28 AM on August 21, 2020


I wish you could land and get out and like, walk around.

Flight Simulator historically had a thing called 'slew mode' that was kind of like that, and is apparently there in FS2020 as well. It's not quite walking, but allows you to move around arbitrarily in any direction (including vertical) and come to a complete stop anywhere.
posted by FishBike at 11:20 AM on August 21, 2020 [1 favorite]


I realize I haven't really heard about problems with the actual flight simulation part, which suggests either that part is pretty good or the wacky terrain is all part of a clever distraction.
posted by ckape at 12:38 PM on August 21, 2020 [2 favorites]


Waiting for a mod that will take out the planes and let me fly, like in a dream, the sound of wind in my ears.
posted by Wetterschneider at 1:40 PM on August 21, 2020 [2 favorites]


Spindle skyscrapers remind me of an aside in Jack Vance's novel 'The Star King', where he describes a culture with a fad of constructing extremely tall single-occupant dwellings.
posted by ovvl at 11:15 AM on August 23, 2020


I realize I haven't really heard about problems with the actual flight simulation part, which suggests either that part is pretty good or the wacky terrain is all part of a clever distraction.

There are turning out to be a fair number of issues with flight dynamics and systems modeling being incorrect or incomplete. And a fair number of things are a bit wacky apart from terrain and buildings. It's not clear to what extent this is just stuff to be fixed or finished as updates happen, and what's a deliberate simplification or omission in the name of scope management or playability, and thus will always be that way. Supposedly later this week, a date will be announced for when the first patch will happen. It'll be interesting to see what's in that.
posted by FishBike at 9:57 AM on August 24, 2020 [1 favorite]


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