Sometimes you have to try something to see if it works. A few days ago I introduced some extra checks that restricted exporting from ModelConverterX when you are modifying a model for which you don’t seem to be the author. I have now reverted those changes, because they didn’t work out as expected. There are three main reasons why they didn’t work as theoretically assumed:

• The mechanism to detect if you are the author was not robust enough, it also gave this warning for people who were modifying their own models.
• The mechanism didn’t account for the fact that some people want to make modifications for their own usage, without the intention to redistribute them.
• The mechanism was mainly intended to protect the complex 3rd party aircraft models, but it turned out more and more AI models also use custom animations. It was never the intention to limit the modification of such models as well.

So due to these reasons I have removed the restriction again now and you can use ModelConverterX on any model as before.

Of course it is still very important that developers respect each others copyright. So that is something that I will keep stressing on the forums. But it didn’t turn out to be feasible to let ModelConverterX check this, without restricting many genuine users. What remains is an appeal on all developers to only distribute work that you have made yourself or for which you have permission to distribute it from the original author.

A topic that is now and then discussed is whether ModelConverterX makes it too easy to steal the work of others. The capabilities of the tool indeed make this possible, but there are also many genuine uses of the tool that many developers use. It should probably been seen analogue to a hammer, which can be used to build a house, but also to break into one.

A small anecdote to underline this is that I have been approach by developers in the past who complained that they expected ModelConverterX was used to steal their work. But a little while later the same developer contacted me with a feature request, since he also used ModelConverterX in his own production chain.

Until now the approach in ModelConverterX has been mainly to warn users and make them aware that they need to consider copyrights. For example by showing a warning when you export a model. Also on the FSDeveloper forum this is a topic we often stress when making modifications of work is discussed.

But now that the skin and bone animations are supported, I hope to release this new feature in a few days, I have come to the point that ModelConverterX can import and export even the most complex FSX models without features being lost on export. The fact that complex features like animations, mouse rectangles, etc. were not supported before was in a few a “feature” to make piracy less attractive because certain features that require a lot of work were lost.

So therefore, together with the release of skin and bone animations, I will introduce some measures in ModelConverterX that will restrict non-genuine use of the tool. As seen in the picture below, when the tool detects that you are not the author of the model it will inhabit export and show a warning. How to detect someone is the author is not easy of course, but the approach that ModelConverterX takes is that it assumes that you are the author if all custom animations and visibility tags are in your ModelDef.xml file. If you don’t have all entries, it is assumed the model is not your work.

I hope that the ani-piracy measures as described above are a good balance between allowing genuine developers to use ModelConverterX in their workflow and making it not too easy for people with bad intentions to steal your hard work. If you have other suggestions or ideas on this balance, please share them with me or the community.

Sometimes a feature is on the wishlist for quite a while. For example the feature request to support skin and bone animations is on the ModelConverterX wishlist for 2473 days already. But since the end of august I’m working on this feature request now and I’m making good progress.

I can already read the skin and bone animations from the MDL files and exporting them again also works. At the moment I’m trying to get the jetway IK animations to export correctly, which is not completely working yet.

Once that is done, there are some minor points that need to be addressed and then this feature will end up in the development release. Let’s see if I can make it before the request is on the wishlist for 2500 days…

The Hierarchy Viewer of ModelConverterX has been renamed to Hierarchy Editor now. As the new name suggests you can now also make changes in this editor.

I have added support to change the visibility condition and mouse rectangle of nodes now in this editor. If you click on the name of the currently assigned value, you will get a drop down box where you can select which visibility condition or mouse rectangle you want to use. The content of this drop down box is based on your ModelDef.xml file. If you select the top item named “None” from the list, then the node will have no visiblity condition or mouse rectangle assigned.

So this allows you to add, remove or change those items for each node of your model. Hopefully this is a useful addition and if there are other suggestions on how to improve the hierarchy editor just let me know.