Finally the date we will move to our new house is nearly there. In a few days we will be moving, so at the moment we are busy packing all our stuff in boxes. Needless to say I’ll be offline for a while, while we are packing and unpacking.
I’m looking forward to have some more time after we have finally moved houses, there are a lot of interesting ideas for my tools I would like to look at.
Now that I can use scenProc to easily create new autogen, the urge to add custom autogen models increases as well. To make the autogen even more realistic I want to add custom roofs, custom vegetation models, etcetera. But all these modifications to the autogen configuration files give developers some headache when trying to deploy their scenery. How to make sure that the end user gets these modifications as well?
The problem is that there is one autogen configuration that all developers modify. So if not done correctly a developer might wipe out the modifications done by another developer. There are a few approaches that are used nowadays:
Obviously one approach 2 is the right way! Approach 1 is bad because it just erases any modification done by other developers. Your scenery will work fine, but others will stop working. Approach 3 might sound like a nice service to the end user, but what happens if the other scenery you include the modifications from update their custom autogen configuration? In that case your product would still include the old one and in that case the order of install will determine the result the end user gets. That’s not good.
So I would say the only way developers should distribute their custom autogen configurations is to only distribute their own modifications (not the default MS configurations, not those of other developers). And developers should properly merge their configurations into the main configuration file.
But of course we will have the issue of developers who don’t play it nice and remove other developers modifications, how do we deal with that? It would be annoying that end users have to reinstall your scenery again just to restore the autogen configuration files.
So I would propose that we make a tool that mimics the behaviour the Microsoft should have added out of the box already. A tool that allows each scenery to have their own local autogen configuration files. Each developer will put his own modifications in a folder within his scenery and the tool will scan all these custom autogen configurations at startup of FS and merge them into one main autogen configuration file. And if this is done at each startup of the sim, developers who wipe out your configurations don’t do any hurt anymore.
I plan to try to create such a tool soon. But I would love to hear back from other developers if this sounds like a good approach. Do you have other use cases in mind that such a tool should cover? Or would you like to help me develop and test this tool? Just let me know!
About two months ago a new edition of FSX was released on Steam, which is basically the same as the FSX Gold Edition. My different tools have been updated by now to be able to support this new edition as well.
When you have both FSX and FSX:SE installed the tools will try to detect FSX first and if found they will use that path to load FS specific items from. If you only have FSX:SE installed that version will be used as FSX install by the tools.
The main difference is that FSX:SE does not include the SDK tools, which are used by most of my tools. And this week we finally got an answer from Dovetail Games as well that they will not include these tools either. This means that developers with only FSX:SE will need to get the SDK tools in a different way.
Installing the FSX SDK only works if you have the boxed version of FSX, since only SDK updates can be downloaded. But you need to install the original SDK from the disc first. So that’s not an option in general for FSX:SE only users. Luckily you can download the P3D 1.4 SDK, which contains equivalent tools and can be downloaded for free. So if you want to use my tools to make scenery and only have FSX:SE installed, be sure to grab the P3D 1.4 SDK and install that. The tools will find the location of the SDK automatically based on the registry settings.
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Since I moved to .NET 4.0 a few weeks ago, some of the tools had random crashes, usually at startup. It turned out this was an issue in the text editor control that is used in the tools. Mainly scenProc and FXEditor were affected, because the text editor is a main part of the GUI there, but ModelConverterX also uses it in some editors.
Yesterday I have fixed these issues, by disabling the buggy part of the control (it was a part we don’t use in the tool anyway). So please make sure to grab the latest development release.
Just a quick note, I am aware that after the recent changes to my build server that the recent changes page is not always very useful. The change log message are sometimes truncated, meaning that not all information is visible. I will try to fix this, so that a good overview of changes is available.
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[Arno Gerretsen] * Development release linked to compile flag now and no longer only to debug mode
[Arno Gerretsen] * Different garbage collection mode to prevent random crashes since switching to .NET 4.0
[Arno Gerretsen] * Fixed crashes in text editor control
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[Arno Gerretsen] * Fixed some mismatches in project files
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[Arno Gerretsen] * Harmonized project files
[Arno Gerretsen] * Launch applications part of automatic build now
[Arno Gerretsen] * Fixed wrong platforms in project
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