Kev’s Blog – Page 73 – Kev's Development Toolbox

August 18, 2020August 18, 2020

MS Flight Simulator 2020: Release day 1 (8/17/2020) download issues

Seems like there’s been plenty of issues on release day 1 getting the new Flight Simulator 2020 downloaded and installed. For me, here’s a summary of some of the issues I ran into:

Installer crashing when using KVM to switch keyboard and mouse to second PC. It took me a while to realize the cause of this as it happens a short while after I made the switch. It seems the installer doesn’t like if you disconnect a wireless mouse or keyboard and the installer would crash without any error to the desktop. Restarting it would pick up from where it left off
App starting even though download had failed part way through. This happened a couple of times for me related to the above. I could get to the globe and select a start airport and destination airport, but the ‘Fly’ button wouldn’t do anything
Downloader/installer showing incorrect total file size download, total download size, and or percentage. This happened related to the above crashes. If the progress bar is not adding up, look in the download dir below and see where you are with the 001 to 031 files to give a rough idea how far along you are

Depending on whether you purchased on Steam or the Windows Store, and where you selected to install to, your location may vary but for me the location was C:\Users\my-userid\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft Flight Simulator\Packages\Official\Steam . To get an idea how far along you are with the download if the progress bar is not making sense, look for files named fs-base-cgl-0.1.21.fspackage.nnn where nnn ranges from 001 through 031 and each of these files is approx 2GB each. Once you get to 031 there’s a handful of much smaller patch files, then the installer starts decompressing each of the 001 through 031 files (which will vary depending on the speed of your CPU and disk – on my Ryzen 5 3600 with Gen 4 m.2 SSD it was taking about 10secs per file)
If you get stuck on one of the numbered files and it seems like the download is not progressing at all, posts online suggest to quit the app, delete the last/most recent file in the above dir on which it’s stuck then start the installer again and it will restart with the last file again

August 13, 2020August 13, 2020

Interrelated personal side projects can be a goldmine of learning opportunities

Some people struggle to find ideas for working on side/personal software development projects for learning (and fun!). I’ve kept a running list of ideas in an online notebook and if I’m struggling for an idea for a new project I refer back to this list.

Over the past couple of years I stumbled across a series of inter-related projects that’s been a goldmine of learning opportunities, from frontend to backend to serverless.

This series of projects started with a question “Can you solve a problem without understanding the problem?”. tl;dr? No. The problem for this activity was solving Sudoku puzzles, and you can read more about this here:

Can you develop code to effectively solve a problem without understanding the problem first? (writing code to solve Sudoku puzzles)

This lead to the next step, researching more about exact cover problems, and how they can be solved with well established algorithms:

Revisiting Donald Knuth’s Algorithm X and Dancing Links to solve Sudoku puzzles

After building an implementation of Donald Knuth’s Algorithm X, I packaged it up as an AWS Lambda, and then built a React frontend for it:

Building a React frontend for my AWS Lambda Sudoku solver

I have one other project in progress for the frontend, replacing Flux with Redux. I’m still working on that one.

After building my solver and the frontend, I starting thinking about how to generate new puzzles. This is in progress here: https://github.com/kevinhooke/sudoku-generator

If you’re generating new puzzles you also need a way to grade the difficulty of puzzles. The unusual thing about this is there’s no established algorithm for grading the complexity of Sudoku puzzles, they’re typically graded by applying human solving techniques, so this led to this: https://github.com/kevinhooke/sudoku-human-grader

This string of related projects has kept me busy of the past couple of years. Not every idea will lead to a series of related projects like this, but if you can find an idea that does, it will keep you busy with plenty of problems to solve and many learning opportunities.

August 3, 2020August 3, 2020

Corsair Force M.2 MP600 500GB Gen 4 SSD benchmarks

I’ve never seen any disk read and write throughput values measured in multiples of GB per second before, this is really quite astonishing. This is the performance benchmark in CrystalDiskMark of my new Corsair Force M.2 MP600 Gen 4 SSD in my new PC build. The motherboard is an Asus X570 Plus:

I’m used to seeing typical 500MB/s reads and writes on a SATA SSD, but these M.2 format SSDs are outstanding.

August 2, 2020August 2, 2020

Comparing screenshots of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002, 2004 and FSX

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 is almost here and I thought it would be interesting to look back at how the scenery has evolved since early versions. I have FS 5.1 (DOS), FS 2002, 2004, and FSX as well as numerous scenery add ons.

Here’s a side by side comparison over Southend, England:

FS 2002 Over Southend with Just Flight South East England VFR Scenery

The Just Flight VFR scenery is pretty good in comparison to the stock scenery. The water textures definitely improved in FSX, but what is it with the colors? Pretty sure the sea at Southend does not look like the Caribbean.

Ok, one more comparison, let’s take a look flying out of Napa in FS 2004:

And now in FSX:

And now with Blue Sky Scenery:

FSX with Blue Sky Scenery, flying West from Napa

It’s about 2 weeks to go before FS 2020 is released. Will be interesting to compare how good the Bing satellite image based scenery is compared to previous FS versions.