For quite some time it has been on my wishlist to study the FS2004 Unlimited Export tutorial that Bill Lionheart made many years ago. It is a very well done and extensive tutorial of over 50 slides. So maybe that scared me off a bit. But recently I read through the tutorial and with my tool developer perspective I realized that it would not be that hard to implement that logic in ModelConverterX. The tutorial has to do al kind of additional steps to work around limitations in the FS2004 GMax gamepack, for example to get your X files. But within ModelConverterX I have full control and access to these items. What also helped is that recently I implemented other ASM tweaks in the FS2004 MDL writer, so that made it easier to do the unlimited export tweak as well.

The current development release of ModelConverterX has the first part of the unlimited export function implemented. That is the bit that works around the 4 mm weld limitation of MakeMDL by scaling up the model on export and then tweaking the ASM file to get the proper size.

If you enable the Unlimited Export Tweak option on the FS2004 aircraft MDL export dialog this 4 mm weld limitation tweak is applied to your FS2004 aircraft model. This means that you can use small details in your cockpit again without losing them on export.

I plan to implement part 2 of the tweak soon as well, those are the tweaks to work around the 65k triangle limit of MakeMDL. Once that is done I will make another blog post about it.