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Comment by Stevvo | Hacker News Reader

"certain geographic locations have invisible borders one can crash into; try to land in the Badwater basin in Death Valley"

The technical reason behind this bug is that Badwater Basin is below sea level; the game thinks you have crashed into the ocean.

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> the game thinks you have crashed into the ocean.

then how come you can land at Schiphol?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjZrizIg2CQ

Manual tweaking, probably.

Well, that just adds to the realism.

https://www.avgeekery.com/challenge-flying-sea-level/

Yeah, who would have thought that there are (dry) locations on Earth that are below sea level? Apparently you can't expect software developers / testers nowadays to be aware of that...

If I'm not assuming people wake up in order to do a bad job, the more likely explanation to me is that

a) these instances are (seen as a percentage of dry land coverage) rather rare and

b) The test of being in water is simplified to `if height <= 0` instead of `if height <= 0 OR location.inside(some_super_complex_polygon_that_needs_to_be_looked_up_every_millisecond)`.

Done is better than perfect.

When you're flying over dry land, they already have to do a collision test to check if you have flown into terrain - so the solution would be to simply not check if you are above sea level when you are flying over land...

You're assuming they distinguish land from sea. It's very likely the map has no such information.

I ran into a similar problem while trying to fly into Wadi Mujib in Jordan so you might be right - Dead Sea is also below sea level.

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