Object conditions

From tomorrow the development release of ModelConverterX is able to handle objects with conditions better. When importing objects that have conditions applied you will get the form as shown below. In this form you can specify the value you want each of the variables to have. Using these values the conditions will then be evaluated and the object is imported with these conditions applied. So for example when reading an aircraft MDL you can use this is import it with the landing gear extended or retracted.

At the moment the form is still a bit technical, with all those numbers. But I am planning to replace the variables by a good description in a future version. The same applies to the (possible) values, if the variable only takes a certain number of values I want to add a dropdown box for them in a future versions.

If you do not want to specify the values of these variables while importing your object, there is a workaround as well. In the options you can specify how conditions are handled. By default they are set to UserSpecified, which means you get the form to give the values. But you can also specify that conditions are always seen as true or false. In that case you don’t have to specify any values.

Together with this change to handle object conditions, the development release will also support reading FS98 and FS2000 aircraft MDL files. Below are two screenshots from an aircraft that imports fine (once with gear and flaps extended and once with them retracted). Not all aircraft MDL files import as good as these however. This seems to be caused by some of the conditions in them, that prevent (parts of) the aircraft from importing. This will be improved in future versions as well, it will take a bit more experimentation to determine the meaning of the different variables used in aircraft MDL files.

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