Leaking memory

Tonight I have been doing some memory leak hunting in ModelConverterX. I have found (and fixed) a few leaks in the 3D preview of the objects. So from the next development release you should see less memory being used, especially when you make changes in the material editor. Also when browsing through object libraries or making an object report you should see less memory usage. I can’t guarantee that all memory leaks are gone, but at least these are fixed.

Ground polygons and autogen

Just before my vacation I already posted about the ground polygons wizard for ModelConverterX. Since then I have been working more on this feature and it is almost ready for inclusion in the development release. This wizard allows you to export your ground polygons without the FS2002 GMax gamepack, ModelConverterX will take care of converting them to the right format to behave as proper ground polygons. At the moment I am doing the last testing and removing some minor bugs.

Parallel to this I am also enhancing the output of the ground polygons wizard to prevent suppression of autogen by these ground polygons. For this I am using one of the airfields of the NL2000 scenery project as a test case, Gilze-Rijen (EHGR). The basic technique to keep the autogen seems to be working, but there are a few bugs left that I need to fix before this can be released as well. So hopefully I will have more news in a couple of days.

FSDeveloper server performance

Over the last weeks there have been some issues with the performance of the FSDeveloper server. Now and then (but quite regularly), the performance of the server is bad. This means that pages load very slow or not at all. We are sorry for this inconvenience and we are looking into this issue. The problem is that every time our hosting company looks at the issue, everything is running fine. So that makes it hard to pin it down. We hope to solve the problem soon though.

Time for a blog post

Yes, I am still updating this blog. We are back from vacation for one and a half week already, but I haven’t had the time yet to write on this blog.

I guess me writing about bad news just before the vacation was not such a good idea either, because the vacation also started with some bad news. They had some trouble with the snow in London Heathrow and cancelled our flight. Luckily they could rebook us on another flight just a day layer, so it did not influence the vacation too much.

So after being away from home (and flight simulator) for a while, I have no picked up the different project again. But I will report more about that in a few other blog posts.

Video tutorials on Wiki working again

Today we found out that during the server move a few weeks ago, the video tutorials on the FSDeveloper Wiki got broken. They were no longer playing or available for download. It was just a tiny server setting that disallowed the video format, but that has been fixed now. So the video tutorials are available for you again!

Some bad news and some good news (and some more bad news)

Let me start with the bad news, I have decided to stop the development of gPoly for the moment. It seems developing two tools, ModelConverterX and gPoly, at the same time does not work that well. I don’t have enough time available to turn gPoly into a stable and usable tool at the moment. Maybe in the future I will continue on the development.

While working on gPoly I have learning a lot of interesting things, about using GeoTIFF images, about doing boolean operations on ground polygons or about Bezier curves. The good news is that not all of this knowledge goes into the fridge together with the gPoly tool. I have decided to add a ground polygon wizard to ModelConverterX. So this mean you can import a MDL file into ModelConverterX, determine the layering of the textures and then export to a BGL file with the FS2002-style ground polygons. And you don’t need to do any ASM file tweaking for this at all. Actually you don’t need to have the FS2002 gamepack at all.

At the moment I got the basics of the wizard working. You can apply the layers and export the ground polygons. The only part that is not working yet is the code to automatically slice polygons into sections of 100 meters. This is required for FSX.

And now the last part of (bad) news. This new functionality is not yet available in the development release. I had hoped to finish it last weekend, but ran out of time. Since we go on vacation in a few weeks, you will have to wait another month for it. But I didn’t think it is a good idea to release some untested functionality, even to the development release just before my vacation.

Convert Wizard update

I have released an update of the ModelConverterX Convert Wizard functionality. The main changes are:

  • There is now also an option to combine textures while converting, thereby reducing the amount of drawcalls
  • Before starting the conversion the wizard now checks if all compilers (like BGLComp and XtoMDL) can be found. If not the user will get a clear message box to remind that these settings have to be provided first.
  • I have also fixed some other smaller bugs in the wizard.

I hope the wizard proves to be useful to users who just want to convert and place a few objects. If there are any suggestions on how to make it more useful, please let me know.

Just for clarity, this wizard is for scenery objects only. It is not a wizard to convert aircraft models between different FS version or something like that. It can convert scenery objects and place them at a certain location in the world.

FSDeveloper server move – status update 2

A little update about the server now. The databases and other content (like attachments) have been migrated successfully. We have performed a test on the new server and everything seems to be working fine. So the next step is to point the domain to the new server and update the DNS. We are currently working on that. This should hopefully be finished soon as well, so that you can reach the new server. I’ll post another update once that is done.