FSX - Best Hardware Combination of the day (redux)

Those of you who read my blog will remember I had posted about what I considered 'best' quality hardware, to run Flight Simulator X. As that post was getting quite long in the tooth, I decided to update it here with my thoughts about current hardware...

Reiterating, a couple clarifications first:

1) Obviously, the absolute-best hardware for FSX would be the most expensive hardware you can buy today, with the possible exception of a graphics card, as FSX is not so GPU-dependent as it is CPU-dependent.
2) We're going for bang-for-the-buck here, so I'll list my choice of what you *should* get, in order to have the best combination for the least-crazy money spent. Obviously, a 1TB solid-state disk that costs $25,000 in itself would be awesome, but it falls outside the normal-people category :-).
3) This list is already obsolete by the time you read this post. Yes, the minute I post it, it's obsolete. Such is the nature of the beast, such is the name of the game. If you want up-to-date, do your own research.

Here are my picks, updated for end-of-2012:

0) Software (yes, I know "best hardware combination", so let's get this out of the way first): Windows 7 x64. Hands down, the best OS to-date. I know that most new PCs come out with Windows 8 these days, but there have been several reports of instabilities and problems with FSX (particularly when it comes to joystick compatibility - USB drivers usually require updates) to make me warn against it. Windows 8 has nothing to offer me, personally, as I will not be running FSX on a tablet PC to have any sort of need for a touch screen.
 
Windows 7 x64 (even with the small issue with adding scenery for FSX, which has a workaround) remains my best choice.

With the Windows choice out of the way, let's make sure we set the stakes for what it is we're trying to define:

On the one hand, we can be looking for a "pure" FSX box, which will run Flight Simulator, possibly a couple FS-related utilities (Squawkbox) and *nothing* else. On the other, we can be looking for a power-user PC which is FSX-oriented, but will also run other software (possibly do some video conversions from DVD to AVI, etc.). Keep this in mind, while you read on...



In my previous post, the choice of CPUs at the time was a bit confusing... Today, things have cleared up quite a bit: In my opinion, the best CPU to run FSX on is the i7-3930K, clocking at 3.2GHz and offering six cores of pure processing power. Runner up for those who can't afford the price tag is the i7-3770K, at 3.5GHz but with four cores available only.

Combine this with the following components, and you'll have a box that is certain to help boost your desired FPS for the upcoming FSX addons which are sure to grab your attention!

- Motherboard: Anything ASUS or GigaByte. The i7-3930K runs on LGA 2011 chipset, while the older 3770K requires an LGA 1155 chipset, so with that in mind, choose a motherboard at the middle of the available price ranges that will offer you those extra items (like USB3.0, eSATA, etc) that will make you feel best.

- RAM: Nothing has changed from my earlier recommendations here: Speed is important, but more so is budget. Grab the MOST (16GB is quite normal these days, with several 32GB options and some 64GB ones that might be a bit on the extreme side) and FASTEST memory you can afford - make sure that you pick reputable brands, if possible go with the motherboard's compatibility list as these chips will have been tested to comply with standards. Be careful to buy memory that runs at lower voltages, as power consumption (and heat dissipated) play a role here too.

- Graphics card: I wrote in my previous post:  "Flight Simulator X is CPU-bound. This means that there will be VERY little difference observed (perhaps a half-frame or so) if you go from an 8800GT 512mb card you bought awhile ago to a GTX295". This is true today too - however, there's a notable exception: There are several graphics cards in the market today that offer *too much* video RAM. Anything above 2GB is actually detrimental to FSX performance (it eats away on your available main memory and causes extra work without offering any real benefit to FSX). Reasons are beyond the scope of this article - if you don't believe me, though, you're free to google your way about this. Note: Another detail to watch here is NVidia vs. AMD - I am one of those who'll go NVidia all the way - purely because I consider visual quality better when it comes to Flight Simulator, plus I consider their drivers more stable. My personal pick at this time is a GTX 670 or similar - just make sure it's at 2GB - no more.

- Hard disk: With the proliferation (and subsequent drop in price tag) for Solid State Disks, my earlier suggestions are even truer today:
For Flight Simulator X, go with a dual SSD disk combination: One for Windows 7 (128GB should be adequate at today's prices) and one for FSX (256GB for those among us who like LOTS of sceneries loaded). Pay particular attention to SSD speeds, while keeping your eye at the price tag. Speeds have improved tremendously over the past couple years and prices are quite decent for what you get.For movies and other data, use your older SATA regular hard disks - they're good enough for me :-).

As before, I'd like to dedicate a sentence to water cooling, which I've found to be much less problematic than people had described it in the past. I've had my system for almost 4 years now and I have found that if you check the components every six months to make sure the coolant levels are maintained (the liquid does tend to require refills every so often), the system will run better than the equivalent air-cooled one (as fans tend to collect LOTS of dust and cleaning them is far more complicated - for me, anyway - than simply refilling a cooler tank).

Well, there you have it. Please let me know if I've forgotten anything you consider crucial for your Flight Simulator PC and I will try to accommodate!

"It's....done."

Didn't someone famous once say this?

Of course, in this case, this applies to two topics.

First, the demise of "Microsoft Flight" - who'd have thought it? Only about 95% of the people involved as beta testers and those third parties who tried desperately to alert the development team that the path they had chosen was so wrong... where would one start? The decision to only include a very limited part of the earth (albeit a beautiful one) as scenery? The decision to dumb down weather so that you could only fly in ISA conditions? The fact there was no ATC? No real selection of aircraft to pick from? So many wrongs...

Having been asked from the very beginning to be part of the effort, our team chose to be very pragmatic and careful about our involvement. As a Microsoft MVP, I had to be candid when asked (which was really not very often) but helpful at the same time. As there's still an NDA that's active, I cannot disclose all what's transpired (though I am sure people wouldn't mind anymore), but I can say that we were quite involved with the first alpha - up until the day Microsoft decided to throw a nice curve ball and tell all third parties "thanks for your time... here's the door" (Edit: contrary to what some people might try to convince you to support their self-conceived importance, third parties were all shown the door pretty much at the same time and received a stock email from the same person). That very day, our team agreed there's probably not much future in the MS Flight saga - not because we're anyone important, mind you, but mostly because the legacy of Microsoft Flight Simulator is really all the people who contributed to make it an active, buzzing community. Freeware and commercial products alike, those were the ones helping the product series live and grow. The biggest mistake throughout the years? Not enough communication by ACES / Microsoft with those developers...

...and this brings me to the second topic where "It's... done" applies:

After five fruitful years, I am no longer a Microsoft MVP - my area of expertise is Flight Simulator and, without a platform to talk about, it came as no surprise (even though the MS MVP team in Europe - leads and business alike - were really sad and were trying hard to keep me under a different role). While the award is given for "past contributions", it's easy to understand why, when I felt the way I did for MS Flight, I wouldn't be as active in that community. This is not to say, however, that I will not remain active and helpful to those who still live and breathe Flight Simulator X - that product is far from dead and its community has been alive and kicking.

So - while this post might sound a bit "negative" - it's really far from it - I think nature has a way of filling its void and with Microsoft out of the picture currently (and for the first time, really!), there will be room for other talented developers to prosper. You know who you are! We are all waiting for you to shine!

Flight Sim Labs A320-X team - reporting back home from Munich

The FSLabs team is now safely back home and has posted some more screenshots of the upcoming A320-X. There was an excellent demonstration and discussion of all the technical aspects of systems and flight modeling that takes place inside the A320, but for now you can feast your eyes on the external model and virtual cockpit images here.

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!

When to gripe to your Virtual Private Server ISP...

As some of you might know, apart from running Flight Sim Labs, Ltd., I have also been wearing the co-administrator hat for FSDeveloper.com for a couple years now...

Not so long ago, the FSDeveloper admins (Arno, Nick, Jon and myself) selected to move FSDeveloper.com to a new server ISP facility, as demand had grown substantially over the years and the older one was showing signs of old age. For reasons of familiarity, we decided the new server would be a Windows-based solution, running on a Virtual Private Server (so costs could remain very low, as we have no real income to support this volunteer-based effort).

This worked exceptionally well since the switch, allowing us to provide better service to our "customers" (Flight Simulator developers) with some nice new facilities, etc.

However, for the past couple months now, we've been getting reports by our users complaining that the server was not too stable - some times they'd be able to log on, other times they'd get connection timeouts or "reset by host" errors. While this was happening, our Domain Name Server also had some issues, so we attributed the problems to faulty name to IP resolutions.

Well- today the problem returned - and returned to stay. Nobody could connect to the web site or the forums, no matter what their location was, their browser, or their ISP. At the same time, however, the administrators could log on to the server via Remote Desktop, so it didn't look to be a network connectivity issue...

Digging into our server showed that while IIS 6.0 was running perfectly well, there were absolutely no user connections honored - instead, a bunch of "Connection_Refused" errors would appear every minute or so in the HTTPERR logs.

Some aggressive googling later, we identified the culprit:

Our ISP has selected Virtuozzo for their Virtual Private Server hosting solutions and our FSDeveloper.com server is one of many VEs running on the same 32-bit physical machine.

While total free RAM on the physical machine is not as important, the case is not so with memory that cannot be "paged out" to disk (such as memory used by critical processes and drivers that need to stay in place all the time). 

The problem was isolated to IIS6.0 and non-paged memory pool shortage issues. IIS will refuse any new connections if it detects that non-paged memory pool usage has increased enough to leave less than 20Mb available on the physical machine (hence the many "Connection_Refused" errors in the HTTPERR logs).

We verified this was the problem by using a workaround - adding a "EnableAggressiveMemoryUsage" registry entry which temporarily fixed the problem, signaling that IIS should not refuse connections until free memory falls below 8MB of non-paged memory pool.

While we're elated that we can now serve our loyal FSDeveloper followers once again, we are a bit frustrated that the REAL solution will have to come from the ISP:

a) limit the number of VEs on the same machine so non-paged memory pool usage is reduced,

or

b) move our virtual server instance to a different machine with less VEs

Solution c) is also a possibility: Selecting a dedicated server to host FSDeveloper.com - however, the expense for this would be about five times larger than the existing solution, so it cannot happen at this time...

Let's see what our friendly ISP has to say about this problem. I'll keep everyone posted when I hear back!

FSX Performance tip

I see this question asked over and over again in forums: "What can I do to increase my FSX performance"? More often than not, the question is answered in ways that I'd describe as... entertaining, but far from true.


Here's a small tip that will fix your FSX performance, almost doubling your FPS, if you are unlucky enough not to have been aware of the consequences:

If you run FSX in Windowed Mode and have the FSX window maximized, sometimes the Windows Start button will overlap your FSX window. If your machine is powerful enough, you'll tend to be annoyed by the seemingly low FPS, but performance will be enough for you to simply be puzzled.


Resize the FSX window to allow the Start button NOT to overlap (or simply hide the taskbar) and you'll find that performance will increase - sometimes even double.


Same holds true for ANY external window that overlaps the FSX display - don't let any of those small popups come in view, as your FPS will drop to almost half (the technical reasons are outside the scope of my note here).


Let me know if you had this issue and if my advice above fixed it!

More info about Microsoft Flight

Microsoft posted some more information on Flight, together with another teaser video.

Find it here.

Microsoft Flight

The cat is out of the bag, it seems... (well - sort of).

Watch the announcement video here and then talk about it here...

Reawarded!

Seems that Microsoft thought that I did good last year again, so they reawarded me as MVP.

My sincere thanks goes to Alessandro and the other people responsible for this (you know who you are!) - I hope I can keep doing what I've been doing to deserve this!

PLEASE don't do this...

I am going to address this blog entry to my fellow Flight Simulation Addon product developers. Some are more experienced than others, we all have a common goal, though: To produce quality addons which will make our simulation audience happy.

Fellow developers, PLEASE don't alter other people's (or companies') registry entries or paths. I know you think you're doing the world a service, but in fact, you're causing (inadvertently, I know it) severe support pains and aren't even aware of it.

Altering a registry key value, ESPECIALLY one that is meant to be controlled BY THE USER, goes against all programming principles we've all learned while programming under Windows. And when that registry key happens to be the setup path where Flight Simulator is installed, you're adding pain and suffering above and beyond your intended goal.

So... please... for the sake of sanity (because where I've been, I am sure you will one time have to be as well). Don't do it. (or, at the very least, alert the user that you will be doing it... or... don't do it. Don't. Don't. Hope I was clear).

Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside...

I don't generally reproduce other people's material as a way to attract readers to my blog, however I have to make an exception here to re-post a note from our Flight Sim Labs forums, as I feel it most accurately represents why I gave up working at Wall Street to start my own flight simulation addon development software house...

I know Dan won't mind me pointing to his very eloquently put comments here.

Thank you Dan, for expressing EXACTLY why we at the "Labs" keep doing what we're doing...

Can you set DEP to "AlwaysOff" on your Dell laptop?

It seems that many people cannot - and unfortunately, this post does not talk about a solution, but rather as a heads-up, or a possible point of focus, for people who might have a solution to offer.

But what is the problem?

Well, as far as I understand it (disclaimer: I do *not* own a Dell laptop), Dell laptops come with a version of preinstalled Windows Vista or Windows 7 on them which has some funky partition mapping on the drive, as well as some disabled features.

For various reasons, there comes a time when users will want to turn the Data Execution Prevention feature off, by opening a Command Prompt Window and entering "bcdedit /set nx AlwaysOff". (This helps run applications that were developed before Vista was available which otherwise trip the DEP flags and crash on the user - some of them being Microsoft's own Flight Simulator series, FS2004 and FSX).

The command can be successfully executed (with administrator rights or elevated privileges), but when the user reboots (sometimes MUCH later on), they are faced with an error 0x7b and a Blue Screen of death (BSOD).

So far, the ONLY reports we have are coming from users with Dell laptops who have NOT scrapped the Dell-provided Windows installations.


The obvious workaround is for these users to FORMAT their drives and install a clean NEW version of Windows (preferably, Windows 7 x64 now), that does NOT come from the Dell-provided disks.


All attempts at contacting Dell about this problem have been met with no success for the moment.

So... do YOU have a solution for this problem? If so, and you are STILL running your Dell laptop with the original, Dell-installed Windows and you were able to turn DEP AlwaysOff, I'm prepared to offer you a free Concorde-X license as a thank-you for sharing that information with me :).

How to cleanly install your NVidia drivers

I get this question time and again. I usually suggest DriverCleaner, a utility that's very helpful in ensuring that there are no annoying remains of possible old drivers left in your system. However, I'll admit that's only half the story. For the best experience and the fullest solution, I recommend reading this article, which describes step-by-step what you need to do to get rid of all issues, once and for all (well, until you have to redo it, I guess).

Note: The article was written with Vista in mind, but it certainly applies to Windows 7 in the same way.

The 'disappearing textures' fix for FSX

A lot of bandwidth has been spent already by FSX users on a problem they are experiencing with complex add-ons, such as the Concorde-X, the LDS 767 and other similar products, whereby aircraft and scenery textures disappear after awhile, leaving them transparent, or worse, crashing the system, requiring a restart. This gets very frustrating, especially if it happens at the end of a long flight, right before landing your simulated aircraft.

Thanks to the dedication and hard work of a distinguished member of the FSX Community, Jesus Altuve, who I want to publicly acknowledge and thank via my blog, it seems that a fix for this problem (which has existed for the past four years, since FSX has been released) is now possible. Jesus has found some new fsx.cfg settings that are undocumented, but help alleviate this issue for everyone that has tried them so far.

It was, however, noted that not every member of our community is equally versed in making changes in their computer, especially when these changes involve digging deep into the internals of Windows folders, some of which are even hidden, and applying edits to files that are normally best left alone by the ordinary FSX user.

As such, I took some time to develop and provide an automated utility that will take care of the edits for you, allowing different levels of control to the various items that are there for editing.

Version 1.0 of the automated FSX Texture Fix utilty is already released in the FSLabs web site forum downloads section. I'd welcome some feedback if you use this utility, as the news on how these edits work is constantly coming and more discoveries are coming out as time passes.

Once more - please allow me to express our gratitude and thanks to Jesus Altuve for his dedication and hard work!

Without further ado, you can download the utility here.