A 12 year old bug and some hierarchy editor changes

Sometimes bugs spend quite some time on my todo list. For example there was a bug in rendering the default FSX EH101 model that has been on that list for over 12 years. At that time I could not found the cause of the rendering issue and since then the problem has not surfaced too often it seems.

But a few weeks ago an user reported a bug with rendering his virtual cockpit and the bug also showed when export the cockpit to glTF for MSFS. So I took the time to dive into the issue in detail this time and I finally found the cause of it. It turned out MCX has been processing certain combinations of transformations and animations incorrectly for a long time already. For all those years the issue only showed as an incorrect rendering in MCX, when the model was exported to a MDL again the problem was not there.

But now with the ability to export to glTF for MSFS as well it turned out to be an issue, as the transformation and animations were also incorrect in the glTF file. The issue has been fixed in the latest development release.

While debugging this issue I also made some changes to the hierarchy editor. I have added an option to add a new child scenegraph node and also to copy and paste transformations and animation between different nodes. Please check the updated manual to see how these new features work. I think they will be useful when working on your model as well.

This was the last bug on my todo list before I release the new stable release. So I guess I will wait a few days to see if no new critical issues appear and then I will start to prepare the new stable release.

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