Microsoft Flight forum closed on FSDeveloper

We have decided to close the Microsoft Flight forum we had on FSDeveloper. The reason for this is that we are a developer oriented forum and at the moment there is not much to discuss about development for Microsoft Flight. Therefore most discussing going on in that forum was gossiping, rumours and guessing. This often turned into heated discussions, not in the friendly tone we like to have in the FSDeveloper community.

Therefore we have closed the forum now. If you want to gossip about Microsoft Flight there are enough other places on the internet to do so. When there is enough information to discuss development for Microsoft Flight, we will of course allow this again on FSDeveloper.

Ground Polygon Wizard: night and seasons

In the last few days I have been working on the last missing feature of the Ground Polygon Wizard of ModelConverterX, the option to add night and seasonal textures from the wizard. This work is not completely done yet, but the part that generates the actual code is done. I just need to finish the graphical user interface and do some more testing. So hopefully I can release this feature in a couple of days. On the right is a small preview of how the user interface will probably look. For each material you can specify with a checkbox if it needs a night texture or seasonal textures as well. Just like you specify the layer and visibility range.

FSDeveloper emails

It seems that we have a few issues at the FSDeveloper website with sending emails. We are investigating these issues now. So if you tried to register a new account and don’t get an email confirmation this can be the cause. If you have trouble with this, please contact us and we’ll try to help you.

Bug fix in Ground Polygon Wizard

A little while ago a user reported problems with the Ground Polygon Wizard. When slicing the polygons, some polygons were missing. I have now debugged and fixed this issue. From tomorrow the improvements are available in the development release. So if you are using the Ground Polygon Wizard please update to this version, the previous version can deform or loose some of your polygons.

Bye bye MVP

Since 2006 I was lucky to get an email every April 1st telling me that I had been awarded a MVP award for that year. But this year I have not been so lucky, I got a message my award has not been continued. So thanks to Microsoft of the opportunity of being an MVP for those years.

Of course this won’t influence my FS activities at all. I will still continue doing what I enjoy doing, making tools for scenery designers, trying to find the limits of FS and running the FSDeveloper community.

RGB reader updated

I have made some updates to the RGB texture loader of ModelConverterX. The first one is a bug fix for textures that are not square and the second one is added support for RLE compression in the RGB textures. With this the most commonly used RGB textures should be read by ModelConverterX.

For those not familiar with RGB textures, this is a texture format designed by SGI that is usually used for OpenFlight models. So with this expansion of the RGB texture loader it should be even easier to convert your OpenFlight models to FSX or Prepar3D. The mass texture editor can now take care of the texture conversion from RGB to DDS.

Drawcall minimizer bugfix

I have just fixed some bug in ModelConverterX, to be more precise in the drawcall minimizer functionality. The bug was that when an object has LODs, the drawcall minimizer did not work correctly. This has been fixed now. This bugfix will be available in the development release from tomorrow.

Basic version OpenFlight reader available

Yesterday I already wrote about the OpenFlight reader for ModelConverterX. Today I have been testing this new reader with some additional models and I have just added the functionality to the development release. So from tomorrow you can give it a try. Besides the models I exported from ModelConverterX itself, I also tried it with some sample models I found on the internet. As you can see in the picture below these also import now.

I called it a basic version because I know there are still some OpenFlight nodes that will not work correctly. The most important of these are the Switch and DOF nodes. Once I get some test models with these nodes in them I will update the functionality further.

OpenFlight reader

I have a list of feature requests for ModelConverterX, some items on this list have a higher priority than others. But as it goes with priorities they sometimes suddenly change a bit. For example I was planning to finish the Ground Polygon Wizard first, by adding support for seasonal textures. But some activities at work meant that the OpenFlight reader, which was almost at the bottom of the list, suddenly got more priority.

So this weekend I started to implement this new reader for ModelConverterX. At the moment I have the basics working, as you can see in the picture below. But this new reader is not yet available in the development release, that’s because I want to test it with more OpenFlight files first. At the moment it works best with OpenFlight files that ModelConverterX created itself. Obviously that is a nice start, but not enough for a functional reader.

So what could you do with this new reader once it is done? You could import OpenFlight files and convert them to FS MDL files. If you are transferring 3D models from another simulation system that uses OpenFlight that might be useful. This is probably mainly interesting for people who are using ESP or Prepar3D for professional purposes.

Hopefully tomorrow I can test this reader with some more objects and once it is robust enough I will make it available in the development release. I’ll keep you informed about the progress.

Creating ground polygons for FSX with SketchUp

Over the last days I have been working on the Amsterdam Heliport for the NL2000 scenery. One of the tasks I did was to update the ground polygons of this scenery. Instead of using GMax for this, I decided to give SketchUp a try. In this blog post I will give an overview of my experiences.

Pros

  • If you use the SketchUp feature to load a background image from Google Earth it is easier to position your ground polygons at the right location in the world.
  • When you draw another polygon in SketchUp that is on top of an existing polygon, the new polygon is automatically cut out of the other one. So this means you need to use less layers in the end, since there are less polygons on top of each other. On the other hand, if you are using transparent textures and what two polygons in the end this can also be a negative feature.
  • I still find it more fun to model in SketchUp than in GMax, it just seems easier.

Cons

  • Mapping the textures is less convenient in SketchUp, especially since you can not alter the mapping of multiple polygons at the same time. So making sure the textures were mapped as I wanted took me more time than I wanted.

Conclusions

So if we balance the pros and cons, where do we end up? I am not sure yet if I prefer GMax or SketchUp for my ground polygons. At the moment I would say it is still 50 – 50. I guess I will have to do another test project to really find out. Maybe one with more markings and other features, to see how that works out.