July 2020 – Digital Tundra

July 31, 2020July 31, 2020

Tech Crunch Review of Flight Simulator 2020 Emphasizes Flaws

A recent review on Tech Crunch emphasized that the Bing Maps data scrubbing in Flight Simulator 2020 is beautiful when it is on target, but frequently is quite obviously off-target. This, combined with new leaks that show blatant artifacts in heavy traffic areas such as San Francisco’s iconic Golden Gate Bridge, reinforces everything I’ve been saying all along about Flight Simulator’s relationship with Bing Maps and Azure AI for months.

Multiple Leaked videos show satellite projections beneath major bridges in San Francisco and New York City.

Don’t get your hopes too high when Microsoft claims that they’ve modeled the entire world in 3D. We all know they’ve done a much poorer job than Google in this regard, and even Google has barely scratched the surface. In reality, what you’re buying is a fraction of what’s available on Google, some hand-crafted airports (40 of them in the Premium-Deluxe edition), a few models of landmarks (even Pyongyang’s May Day Stadium has a model), with a whole bunch of auto-gen scenery in between (which is how 99.99% of the world will be rendered by my estimation). The auto-gen techniques are probably just an evolution the same techniques you would have found in FSX, but clearly updated for the first time in 13 years.

July 28, 2020August 12, 2020

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, Pyongyang, How Bad can it Get?

A recently leaked video of Flight Simulator shows just how ugly the scenery can get when you travel off the beaten path in the upcoming Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020.

Microsoft has been careful to control the messaging coming out of FS2020, only publishing screenshots and videos that are polished and show the simulator in it’s best light.

July 10, 2020July 15, 2020

Big Brain Memory Manager Updated for 2020, the first update since 2013

Download BigBrain2020.

If you are using the standard Delphi Memory manager in your Delphi applications, you’re probably missing out.

One of the things, I really like about Delphi is that it ahs always offered an easy way to replace the memory manager with your own, or one that you get from a 3rd party. Being a nuts-and-bolts kind of programmer, coming up with a better memory manager for Delphi naturally became an intense personal obsession.

I have also always been particularly fascinated by the idea that a computer could have multiple CPUs and, therefore, do more than one thing at the same time. I built Big Brain as a personal challenge… to see if I could make Memory Allocations run faster on systems with multiple cores and CPUs.

The first version was released circa 2000, and was eventually adopted by hundreds of companies and organizations. I stopped “selling” it in 2007, giving it away for free on a boring, white web page with just a couple of links.

20 years later, I am still just as obsessed with nuts and bolts and multi-processing, and I test out my designs on an AMD 2990WX chip, which has 32 cores, capable of handling 64-threads in addition to various 16, 8, 6, 4, and 2-Core Intel and AMD chips.