Massive and weird chasm visible in the new Microsoft Flight Simulator

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/10/02/massive-and-weird-chasm-visible-in-the-new-microsoft-flight-simulator.html

6 Likes

“Hey Jeremy why-t’@#$ did you import the C# complex number library?”

4 Likes

Why are these glitches?

Why can’t insanity in a game be a feature?

it would be a lot more fun with 10000 ft tall buildings and bottomless pit airfields. Why not put an Airfield at the bottom of the Marianas Trench and let somebody actually fly down there with everything as a waterfall for 8 miles

9 Likes

What’s cool about the glitch is that trees, buildings and vehicles, etc. are all placed on the vertical surfaces. So a glitch that could just look like a big weird sinkhole becomes something altogether stranger and more uncanny.

This particular video is also interesting in that it indicates how the landscape gets constructed - in seeing the backside, you can literally see the seams of world.

5 Likes

Good chance the altitude is incorrect on some official record and nobody cares enough to fix it because it’s a VFR only airstrip in South America so the problem has never come up before.

4 Likes

For a moment it looked like he couldn’t get out without stalling.

In the flight sim in google earth you can fly through the surface of the sea and head down to the sea floor. I once tried going down into the mariana trench but got so freaked out I had to zoom back to the surface

There’s nothing down there but dark, but it’s such an eldritch, forbidding dark my monkey brain just wouldn’t let me go further

I have no idea how the people who do it in real life don’t emerge gibbering wrecks

6 Likes

In the old days, the ultimate challenge was to successfully land a plane on top of the World Trade Center. A few of us managed to do it.

2 Likes

I liked a lot the audio visual atmosphere from 7:30 on. Somewhat Inception-ish, but more chilling, darker. If I was in their shoes I’d consider using the concept for a new stand alone game.

2 Likes

This is just one of the portals to the Hollow-Earth.

2 Likes

We need to mod in some UFOs, to add to the authenticity.

And maybe some music.

2 Likes

Maybe they could release a Bermuda Triangle expansion pack.

Supernatural Tinfoil Hat Flight Simulator.

2 Likes

I was hoping to see a fiery hand reach up out of the chasm and pull that plane down.

3 Likes
4 Likes

I don,t see the typo in the sentence about the typo.

So, as you can imagine, the hacker/modder/cracker community has been ALL over MFS2020. Baby steps so far, since Microsoft doesn’t let just anyone play around with this stuff, but we are making progress. One of the main points of vulnerability is the place where the code proper (dark, obfuscated, encrypted, secret) interfaces with the Bing maps engine (public, standard, open). For the most part, of course, it’s pretty straightforward. The areas around airports draw more attention from the program than random cornfields. It overrides certain known topographies where the map is too confusing for the terrain-generating tools to work correctly. For example, the program wants every island to have a visually defined “shore,” but if you have a ton of tiny little islands dotting a lake that won’t work, so it ignores the map and just creates one or two of them.

This is no secret so it’s not really obscured. BUT, there are some of these instructions written as a weirdly obfuscated machine code set. Basically there’s a reference to a bunch of tables of ones and zeroes, and specific “passages” in it, which are then run through a little pas de deux of assembly and back, I think just to screw with decompilers. The good news is that it calls attention to itself; the bad news is that we still don’t know exactly what it is telling the program to do. But we do know that one of those spots is related to THIS spot. The output, obviously still not in anything recognizable as machine code or assembly (and certainly not any higher-order programming language) pretty obviously matches up with Unicode characters. But (a) that’s stupid and (b) we still don’t know what it says. See if you can figure it out. This is the cleaned up version; the actual output maps to the U+16A0 - U+16FF block. But it’s so obviously within the range of the typical Western character set that the consensus is that it was meant to read as a-z/A-Z rather than a bunch of ᚠᛀᛋ gobbledygook.

mmessvnkaSenrA.icefdoK.segnittamvrtn
ecertserrette,rotaisadva,ednecsedsadne
lacartniiilvIsiratracSarbmvtabiledmek
meretarcsilvcoIsleffenSnI.

Bonus weirdness, whatever this is was apparently originally meant for Iceland, but because this whole process is playing a bit fast and loose with memory locations, it overwrites the position and it wraps around to Brazil instead.

This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.