Digital life in the frozen tundra.
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.
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.
As I argued yesterday, you can’t Azure AI your way past complete utter, total lack of accurate data. Flight Simulator 2020 will leave Flight Simmers wishing that they had Google’s data. How bad will it be? Well, here’s a side-by-side comparison — a mix and match, including some major cities and mid-sized cities that you might want to fly a plane to.
UPDATE: It should be noted that this is a comparison of Microsoft vs. Google data sets and none of these screens are from FS2020. However, it is relevant to note that FS2020 is using Microsoft’s Bing Maps to inform the sim about areas of the world that human artists don’t have the time, incentive, nor budget to painstakingly comb through. I do not have insider access, so I can’t tell you, for example, how good or bad Tokyo looks in FS2020, and even if I had insider access, I’d be bound by NDA to say nothing, however I can tell you that Microsoft published a pretty poor screen shot of Warsaw, Poland that was missing virtually all of the Warsaw skyline. None of these screenshots are from Flight Simulator 2020 therefore I am making no observations about what the actual scenery in FS2020 will actually look like, and in fact, much of what I’m talking about here is pure speculation. Microsoft could, for example, rely on additional surveys and artwork hand-crafted by 3D artists to render Tokyo… however… the point I’m trying to make here is that the forgotten parts of the world are going to be only as accurate as Bing Maps and Azure AI can artificially make guesses.
We all know that Google and Microsoft both have good data for New York and San Francisco… but what about Honolulu, Tokyo, Flint, Rockford, IL? What about the mountain ranges? This gallery might leave you wondering how in the heck Microsoft expects to employ Azure AI to auto-gen all this missing architecture. It would probably, honestly, be easier for them to just buy it from a vendor.
EDIT: This article was updated to reflect that the Bing App offers better information than what’s on the Bing Maps website.
I’ve spent a lot of time pondering the pending release of Microsoft Flight Simulator “2020” as it is commonly known (although not officially titled, and only presumed to be released in 2020).
A number of people out there have been given “insider” access. I, however, am not one of them. Therefore, unlike an “insider”, I am not bound by any NDA agreements that have sworn others to secrecy.
Okay… here we go again… I haven’t tried to build for iOS in about a year. There’s a new Delphi version (10.3.3) and my first attempt at testing my app (which BTW works on Android) has failed miserably. This document is a blow-by-blow of my experience in fixing it.
Continue reading “How to connect Delphi to iOS in 2020”
First of all, the idea of the Zenbook Pro Duo is a great one. I hope that Asus and other companies feel compelled to answer this design with future, better, more refined designs.
Seems like a simple thing right? You want to do a UDP Broadcast to find devices/services on the network and then display them in an elegant list, right? Whereas it isn’t exactly an immensely difficult problem, knowing the right formula from the start is a must. There are other pre-canned discovery services out there, Bonjour, for example, but I really wanted to make my own just so that I could understand what all the fuss was about. Why do my friggen Chromecasts sometimes have a hard time appearing on the network? As simple as the problem seems, there are a few “gotchas” and other things to consider, however I was able to find a 100% working solution. Maybe you will find these advice points useful.
The new Port Royal benchmark is beautiful, but you really have to have TWO Geforce RTX 2080Ti graphics cards to appreciate it. It is worth noting that the Port Royal benchmark does not run at 4K. I’ve heard reports that it runs at 1440p, but it looks terrible enough that I feel it might even be dialed back to 1080p. On my watercooled. overclocked RTX 2080ti it averages about 35fps. If you force it to run at 4k, it will barely pass 15fps and is totally unwatchable.
In the face of demands from my employer to jump in front of the nearest, fastest-moving bandwagon, I have been searching for a reason to “like” Python. Unfortunately as of this writing, I still have not found one. In the meantime, I’ve found plenty of reasons to NOT like Python. Continue reading “You can’t do that with Python”
Is Battlefield V a good representation of the future of game graphics? Probably not. And it isn’t even a decent game in it’s own right.