Are nice people born in March?

The forum software that we use at the FsDeveloper website has the option to automatically send a congratulation email to user that have their birthday at this day. Of course this only happens if the user has entered his day of birth. Sometimes I get a reply on these automatic messages, usually just a quick thanks. But in the last two days I got about 3 such replies, which is a lot more than usual. So this made me wonder, would people born in March be friendlier?

Library Creator XML 2.0, a new build

I have just uploaded a new build of Library Creator XML 2.0 alpha to the forums. In this latest build I have added back most of the functions that are available in the 1.0 version. Only the Rwy12 export is still missing, I will try to add that again in the next build.

But I have also added some completely new functionality. You can now drag and drop your MDL files onto the tool from Windows Explorer. This makes it even easier to add objects to your object library.

So check out this latest version and as soon as I have added all functionality back, I will also start to write a good manual.

 

Website running again

The FsDeveloper website is online again, but I had to disable the download section for the moment. It was the script from the download section causing the server load. It seemed someone from China was calling this script very often. Until I have found a solution for this, the download section will remain offline. I will try to install the latest version of the download script tomorrow, to see if it helps.

 

Some normal map tricks

I do promise this will be my last post about normal maps for today, as I finally got them to work as I wanted.

Due to the way MS has written their shaders, some special care is needed when constructing your normal map texture. If you just use the plugins that are made for it, the shading of your object will be wrong in FS. So take these steps to get the correct result:

  1. First make sure you have a bump map for your texture
  2. Convert it into a normal map with the plugin
  3. Copy the content of the red channel to the alpha channel
  4. Make the red channel black
  5. Invert the green channel
  6. Make the blue channel white

Now you can use your normal map, simple add it under the bump map slot of your material and save the DDS as DXT5. It is important to use DXT5 as it has an 8 bit alpha channel and also keeps the quality of the green channel quite good during compressing. So this will mean the compression does not hurt your bump map too much.

So it means a little work when making your normal map, but I can understand why MS made the shader like this. It ensures we can use compressed textures, without the quality of the bump map being reduced a lot.

 

How normal maps work

For those of you that are trying to understand more about the normal mapping (or bump mapping as it is called in the gamepack) that can be used in FsX, have a look at this nice tutorial. It helped me a lot in understand more of the principles behind it.

At the moment I am still figuring out the last bits of how it works in FsX, but after that I hope I can write a little article about it.

 

Cool idea to create normal maps

As you might have seen in the forums, I have been playing with bump mapping for scenery objects lately. While I was searching the web for a little more information, that might solve my shading problem as mentioned in the forum, I can across a nice tutorial that shows how you could create a bump (or normal) map for an object. I find it a pretty cool idea, I only think it will not be very practical to light a building from multiple sides just to make your normal map.

 

Working with FwTools

I have added a new article to the Wiki that explains how you can use [FwTools] to create GeoTIFF files, which you can use for your photo scenery. There might be other tools to do such tricks, but I am familiar with FwTools as I use it at work. And besides that it is a open source project, which means it is free to use. So therefore I decided to make a little article about it.

The article describes how you can add positional information to an image and how you can reproject it to WGS84 if needed. Hopefully the article is useful to some of you and I will try to expand it with other useful information when I find some more.