SceneryDesign.org A little while ago I already wrote about the fact that I was working on my own texture loaders for the ModelConverterX tool. I have now finished the first versions of the loaders I find most important for the tool. I say first, as I am sure some bugs will be surfacing when they are […]
Texture file formats
Loading the textures files into the ModelConverterX tool is something that has given me quite some challenges already. I have used different libraries for it already and all of them gave me some trouble. At the moment I am using the library by Martin Wright and although this one can read all the files I […]
ModelConverterX and x64
Just after the release of the new ModelConverterX version, fellow MVP Lefteris reported the first bug to me. That in itself was not so weird, as there have been many bugs reported during the previous testing phases. But the bug that was reported was a bit unusual. It seemed the tool did not run on […]
User interface and manuals
It’s already some days ago that I wrote that the next version of ModelConverterX is almost ready. One reason for the delay is that I got a cold this week and that reduced the amount of time I would like to spend behind the screen a bit. But another reason is that I, and I […]
Real-time rendering
Recently I bought an interesting book, Real-time rendering. I have not completely finished reading this book, but it contains a lot of useful information. For example I have found there solutions for some problems I had while working on my ModelConverterX tool. But the explanation of how the rendering process works also give a better […]
Triangulation
Today I did some more work on the ModelConverterX tool again. There were some complex polygons that were not converted into triangles correctly, so I had to improve the triangulation algorithm. I did make such an algorithm a while ago for another tool, but that one was for 2D polygons only. So I had to […]
Tango Desktop Project
Today I was looking around on the web for some icons to use in the ModelConverterX tool. Of course there are a lot of places where you can buy very expensive icons to use in your application, but that was not really what I was looking for. In the end I came across the Tango […]
Working with the GeoTIFF library
I came across this interesting article on how to use the GeoTIFF library today. This might be of interest for FS scenery tool designers as well, since the GeoTIFF format can now be used with the FsX resample. So that makes the GeoTIFF format also interesting for background images in tools for example.
GFL SDK
Loading in all the different kind of textures that FS supports in a tool can be a quite challenging task. Some scenery object use 8 bit textures, others 32 bit, or compressed DXT textures. Some objects even still use the old RAW textures with a palette. And in FsX the DDS format has been added […]
COLLADA
For the new model conversion tool I am working on at the moment, I took a closer look at the COLLADA format this weekend. COLLADA is an open standard Digital Asset schema for interactive 3D applications. It can for example be used as an exchange format to share models between different tools. That is also […]