Some bad news and some good news (and some more bad news)

Let me start with the bad news, I have decided to stop the development of gPoly for the moment. It seems developing two tools, ModelConverterX and gPoly, at the same time does not work that well. I don’t have enough time available to turn gPoly into a stable and usable tool at the moment. Maybe in the future I will continue on the development.

While working on gPoly I have learning a lot of interesting things, about using GeoTIFF images, about doing boolean operations on ground polygons or about Bezier curves. The good news is that not all of this knowledge goes into the fridge together with the gPoly tool. I have decided to add a ground polygon wizard to ModelConverterX. So this mean you can import a MDL file into ModelConverterX, determine the layering of the textures and then export to a BGL file with the FS2002-style ground polygons. And you don’t need to do any ASM file tweaking for this at all. Actually you don’t need to have the FS2002 gamepack at all.

At the moment I got the basics of the wizard working. You can apply the layers and export the ground polygons. The only part that is not working yet is the code to automatically slice polygons into sections of 100 meters. This is required for FSX.

And now the last part of (bad) news. This new functionality is not yet available in the development release. I had hoped to finish it last weekend, but ran out of time. Since we go on vacation in a few weeks, you will have to wait another month for it. But I didn’t think it is a good idea to release some untested functionality, even to the development release just before my vacation.

4 thoughts on “Some bad news and some good news (and some more bad news)

  1. Hi Arno!

    Suspending the gpoly is indeed a bad news. But inculding a background editor in MDX is great news. Actualy this is what we need. Please do not forget to include the seasonal texture editing in asm (night textures too).

    I wish you a pleasant holiday!
    Let me take the opportunity to wish you merry Christmas in the name os LHSimulations, a succesfull new year. We hope you do the same excellent job in 2011 as you did in 2010.

  2. arno says:

    Hi,

    Yes, those seasonal and night textures are on my todo list as well.

    I will not be using ASM file or the FS2002 MakeMDL at all. I decided to use SCASM as compiler for the ground polygons. That makes it much easier for the people who do not have FS2002 Pro and in the end the BGL file is the same anyway.

  3. Hi Arno. Looking forward to your new version of MCX. It will make everything easier. Thanks a lot!
    Greetings from Spain.

  4. Danny says:

    I can’t wait to try out the new functionality since I am slowly but surely getting back into FS design.

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