Flight Sim Labs A320 - new pictures posted!

I am happy to report that the A320 is progressing very nicely - there were some new pictures posted in the FSLabs Facebook page that you can check out here.

Restore your System drive from Windows Home Server - a tip

My main office PC experienced a hard disk crash the other day. No worries, I said, that's why we've invested in the Windows Home Server backup setup, so that snags like this can be resolved with the minimum of downtime, right?

Wrong.

Four days later and several attempts at restoring (I could work in the meantime using my laptop) provided fruitless. I was close to giving up, formatting the new hard disk that came as the replacement and installing Windows 7 anew. I could not, however, ignore the "piss off" factor that was telling me I would not be defeated by a bloody program, especially since this is exactly why we had installed WHS in the first place - so we could restore anything, anytime.

Well, the problem was simple, silly and, as it turns out, easily fixable (aren't they all), but I couldn't really detect it as I never bothered sitting out the entire process (or timing it): When I would start the restore process, WHS would say that it would take about 3-4 hours to restore my disk. As such, I usually started this process at night, before bed, etc. only to find out in the following morning that it had failed with an "unspecified network error". 

The first time, I thought it was the Ethernet switch to blame, so I plugged the PC directly into the router where WHS is connected (topology not important, as it turned out).


The second time, I thought it was the (new) hard disk to blame, so I switched hard disks.


The third time, I decided to read all sorts of blogs and discussions which suggested I had to have the new disk formatted first, but without an assigned drive (C: or whatever), only mount it as an active partition.


The fourth time (I was getting close to throwing the thing out from the second floor window) I finally decided to give the error log some attention and the truth appeared in front of me: The "unknown network error" was in fact a timeout of the DHCP-provided IP address that the WHS Restore CD was getting for the PC's network card, as the router providing the dynamic IP was set (by default) to expire the DHCP lease after one hour (ONLY - what are they smoking?).


Setting the router to expire the DHCP leases after a week and restarting the PC finally got the restore process to finish properly and I am now writing this blog entry from my main office PC.

Let's hope others might read this and save themselves the grief.

A picture is worth a thousand words...

so I wonder... how much are a thousand pictures worth? :)

Here's a small preview of the A320 external model, for your viewing pleasure...

ILSpy - a free .NET assembly browser and decompiler

My good friend Arno Gerretsen, developer of various famous tools for Flight Simulator model and scenery development, found a very useful undocumented parameter that can be used in one of the base FSX SDK tools, XToMdl.exe to help with scenery object manipulation.

This got me thinking: Knowing that most of the tools developed for the FSX SDK were written in a .NET language (C# or VB), would I be able to detect other undocumented goodies, or even possibly look into the source code to decipher some of the logic and/or see if there could be work-arounds available for known issues?

This led me into a search for tools that can be used to decompile .NET code. Unfortunately, all my searches came up with commercial products that were more expensive than the funds I could allocate (namely: Zero dollars) so I was running on empty, until I bumped into a news article (written in dotnetzone.gr, the Greek software developers community) which explained that there is now an open-source .NET assembly browser and decompiler called ILSpy.

I downloaded and tested ILSpy and found it quite worthwhile, so I can only recommend for inquiring minds who want to know!

A320 - A small update

I don't know if you saw, but we posted a small update on the development of the A320 for FSX. While it only shows the 2d captain main panel, it should offer some insight on what we're planning for the A320. To read more about it, go here.

Was this for our own good? (Part III) - a.k.a. "Fault Tolerant Heap??? I don't want your Fault Tolerant Heap..."

I've been doing some work on the AIRAC database loader for our upcoming FSLabs A320 addon... mainly to make it load faster. Well, that's an excuse - the real reason was, I read an article about the new Concurrency features that Visual Studio 2010 provides and I was really curious if using the Concurrency library would make things faster by parallelizing some specific pieces of my code - and guess what! It does!

The example code I chose was the AIRAC database file that contains the NAV FIX points - all 183 thousand of them, which were previously being loaded serially through the file - I thought, wouldn't that be a good example for parallelism?

I changed the code to allow for Concurrency - and had a simple heap corruption error... that I couldn't find at first (don't worry, I've found it since). Three test runs later, the debug version of my test application started running VERY slowly... and I mean VERY slowly... (about 100 times slower per 5000 fixes read in), making things quite undebuggable... ("but I hadn't changed anything, I swear!") and that was one of those moments when I started staring at the screen, not quite knowing "WTF" (I saw somewhere an explanation of this from a father to his child... Sir, it does NOT mean "Welcome To Facebook" - but I digress...)

Then an epiphany occurred. One of those light bulb moments, when you look at the debugger output window and notice an extra line there that wasn't there before...

 "Fault tolerant heap shim applied to current process. This is usually due to previous crashes."

A bit of Googl Microsoft Bing-ing later, and I could find the reason: Windows 7, in all its Microsoft spirit ("Don't worry, we'll fix it for ya!"), decided that my heap was getting corrupted too often by this irresponsible and stupid application executable and needed some more totalitarian help... ("Sir, nothing to see here, move along"), so it added the (debug) executable to its internal list of "applications which don't behave".

Long story short, when FTH (Fault Tolerant Heap) services are active for a specific application, it starts CRAWLING instead of running properly because each heap activity (which, for 183 thousand entries means 183 thousand of them) would be monitored and followed...

The solution was simple enough: Kill the specific FTH registry entry for that app, restart - all is well again.

The registry key where all this 'magic' exists is

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\FTH\State

if you find ANYTHING in there, other than the (Default) key, please be aware that that specific app will behave very poorly, because "Big Brother" is watching it.

Wouldn't the solution be simpler if instead of making our apps silently crawl, Microsoft would simply pop a message up saying "Your app sucks. Fix it, or else"?

FlightProSim (or ProFlightSim or ProFlightSimulator) - a scam?

For days now, I've been subjected to unwanted advertisement when I log onto my Facebook account, by a newly formed (?) company out of Australia claiming to have developed "The Most Realistic Flight Simulator Ever Created For Desktop Computers".

Now, I've kept in touch with almost all the PC flight simulator development teams globally for the past ten years or so and it came as somewhat of a surprise to see an unknown entity suddenly appear with such bold claims - I admit, it felt quite embarrassing to me.

It didn't take long, however, to understand what sort of "deal" these people are offering - misleading at best, outright shameful and quite annoying for the majority of simmer friends globally who have contacted me to ask if I have any "inside scoop" on this "new simulator", only to discover the truth at the end.

You see, this is nothing else but a quiet rebranding of the GPL'ed (thus forever free) and well-known Flight Gear simulator that has been in development for many years now by a team of volunteers who do not charge (or receive) a single penny for their efforts.

Read the entire scoop here.

To you, Mr "Dan Freeman- 13 Hickson Road, Walsh Bay, Sydney, NSW, Australia" (that's the owner of that "ProFlightSim" web site at the time of this blog post writing), all I have to say is: Shame, Shame, Shame!