“Purchase Pending” error in Microsoft Flight Simulator Marketplace (if you purchased MSFS via Steam)

If you originally purchased Microsoft Flight Simulator via Steam, you may run into an error where any in-game purchases in the Marketplace never complete successfully, you yet a “Purchase Pending” message on the alerts/bell icon in the top right of the screen.

In order to complete in-game purchases, the Steam Overlay needs to be enabled in 2 places:

  1. In the Steam client settings here:

2. On the Flight Simulator game settings in Steam here (right-click game in Steam, then Properties):

By default in-game you should be able to press Shift-Tab and the Steam Overlay will open. If it doesn’ go back and check the settings above, and chec k the key combo is not mapped to anything else. If you can’t get the Overlay to open, the in-game purchase via Steam will not complete either, because the in-game purchase pops up a Steam purchase dialog.

Now when you purchase an add-on in the in-game Maretplace, you should get a Steam dialog popup to complete the purchase via Steam, and then you download will start.

Learning Java 8 Streams

I’ve never had a good opportunity to use Java 8 Streams since traditional iteration approaches always seemed to be appropriate for what I needed. Working on my Sudoku related projects (in particular an implementation of a Human Solver) I needed an approach to count occurrences of numbers in Lists and also find where pairs existed in Lists.

To get started, I started with a number of simpler examples to gradually work up to what I was looking for. I’ve collected a number of my examples in this project here.

Java 8+ ISO8601 date formatting with LocalDate, Instant and DateTimeFormatter

ISO8601 datetime formats are commonly used especially when storing dates as Strings. Java 8’s java.time.format.DateTimeFormatter has a predefined formatter to format as ISO8601, DateTimeFormatter.ISO_INSTANT, but applying it to a DateTime instance gives an exception:

String formattedDate = DateTime.now().format(DateTimeFormatter.ISO_INSTANT);
java.time.temporal.UnsupportedTemporalTypeException: Unsupported field: InstantSeconds
at java.time.LocalDate.get0(LocalDate.java:680)

If you check the JavaDocs (here) there is a comment that states:

"This is a special case formatter intended to allow a human readable form of an Instant"

Changing this code to use an Instant instead:

DateTimeFormatter.ISO_INSTANT.format(Instant.now());

works as expected:

2021-04-25T22:09:40.690Z

More Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 scenery oddities: Cranes as solid objects and decaying structures

I’ve shared several posts with some pics of unusual issues with Microsoft Flight Simulator (here and here). My favorites so far have to be how cranes are rendered, this is probably understandable given that they are typically very tall and relatively thin structures compared to other typical buildings. What I find interesting is that there’s a couple of ways these are rendered, varying from solid objects (the space under the crane overhang is rendered as a solid object), all the way to spindly structures that are ‘close’ but still not quite right.

Here’s examples of cranes as solid objects.

Oakland, CA docks – one solid, one as a tree:

Solid but melty:

Newark docks, NY – cranes as solid boxes:

Cranes fused into ships:

Tall solid blocks:

Rows of solid blocks:

At the docks at Le Havre, France, the scenery from above is incredibly detailed in this area:

… but as you approach ground level you see in this area there is no attempt to render these cranes as 3d objects at all, they’re just painted to the ground of the scenery (and like most ships not rendered as 3d objects the ship is partially submerged). This avoids the issues with the 3d rendering I guess:

At the docks at Avonmouth, UK (near Bristol), the cranes in this area are not solid which is a different approach, but they’re rendered as if they are heavily rusted, decaying structures:

Some of the cranes look like they could be animals:

This group is my favorite so far:

Possibly my favorite MS Flight Simulator 2020 screenshot so far. I love the Daliesque nature of whatever this structure was in real life: