NLR at YouTube

At bit off topic maybe, but recently I found out that my company (the Dutch Aerospace Laboratory – NLR), put some nice promotion videos on YouTube. So if you might want to see a bit of the things I am doing for work have a look. Especially this video gives a nice overview of some of the simulation facilities I am working with.

Export of animations

Although the functionality to automatically generate lower polygon models for the LOD is not finished yet, I still have to add functionality to preserve materials and mappings better, I have decided to move over to another big thing on my ModelConverterX todo list. The main reason for this is that I need that other functionality more at the moment for some objects I want to convert.

What I am working on now is exporting of animations. In the preview it is already possible to show the animations of imported FSX MDL files, but it would be much more useful if they could also be exported from the tool. That would also open the possibility to convert the animations that might be contained in API macros that you are converting.

The bad news for me is that I found out the internal model I use to store the object in needs some modification to work more efficiently with animations. So at the moment I am working on that. After that I hope to add some new features again. With animation support in there as well, I have finished all of the main new features I planned for version 1.0 of ModelConverterX. Some features still need to polished a bit more, but I feel a new release to the general public is not very far away anymore.

ModelConverterX magic

The last few days I have been working hard on improving the ModelConverterX tool again. Some other members of the Netherlands 2000 Scenery Design team were busy trying to convert some of the old API macros in the project to new FSX MDL files, so they provided me with a fresh stream of bugs.

While testing one ship object I came to an interesting conclusions, illustrated by the screenshot below. In the screenshot you see the ship in ModelConverterX in the top left corner. On the right you see it twice in FSX. The ship at the back is the original API macro. It is obvious that FSX has trouble to display some of the features of this object. Apparantly this object uses some opcodes that are soo old that FSX no longer fully supports them. But the ship in the front is the same object, placed as a FSX MDL file after converting it with ModelConverterX. This looks a lot more like the ship it is supposed to be.

I found this a nice example to illustrate the benefit of converting your old objects to the FSX format. That is also the purpose I started making ModelConverterX for in the first place.

Some Wiki updates

I have added some additional information to the FSDeveloper Wiki.

  • Update of the information on the FSX MDL format. This is mainly what I figured out while adding support for animations to ModelConverterX.
  • Added an article to explain the different DXT compressions that can be used for textures. I would be happy to receive any feedback wether the information is understandable for a normal developer in the way I have written it.
  • Added an article about the FSX AGN format. It is far from complete at the moment, but hopefully it provides a start for more information on this format to be collected.

Replacing the object market

Before we had a forum called Object market at the FSDeveloper site where people could share
their work with other developers. This forum has now closed and all
objects from it have been added to the downloads section.

Of course users are still free (or I would even say encouraged) to contribute their work to the download section. Here you can find all instructions on how to do so.

New categories

I have added two categories to the FSDeveloper forum. One for autogen related questions and another one for Microsoft ESP specific discussions. The ESP forum is meant for things that are related to ESP only, if it is a design question that applies to FSX and ESP both please use the existing subforums for scenery and aircraft design. I have also tried to move all posts that should belong in these forums to them already.

Merry Christmas and Happy 2009

The last time I have been quite busy, so therefore there have not been any new posts on this blog recently. I have just come back from a short vacation in Belgium and am full of energy again to do some interesting FS related things in the remainder of my Christmas break. I plan to for a bit on the FSDeveloper forum and Wiki, work on the ModelConverterX tool and what else comes to mind. Probably I will have more plans than time, just like the years before…

Let me wish everybody a Merry Christmas and a happy 2009 already.

The tool I should have made earlier

I think it was more than a year ago. Nick asked me if I would make a tool and my answer was that it was not necesairy because the tweak only involved a few easy lines of ASM code. Yesterday I started making a tool for this simple tweak, plus some other features. What am I talking about? Ground polygons. If you look at the forums they remain a hot issue all the time. Having to use the FS2002 gamepack, having to tweak the ASM code by hand.

So now I started working on a tool that I called GroundPolygonAssistent. It will help you to do the following things:

  • Tweak the ASM code of ground polygons to make them proper ground polygons
  • Combine different layers of ground polygons in one BGL file
  • Split the polygons if they are bigger than a certain size, this can be useful for FSX, where they have to be smaller than 100 meter to work correctly with the curvation of the earth
  • Output the polygons with different reference points, this can be useful for big airports where accuracy errors occur at big distances from the reference point and it can also increase the overall performance a bit
  • Reproject the polygons, sometimes the data might be in a different projection than the flat earth one used by FS for its XYZ coordinate system, in that case the tool will help you to keep the accuracy of your origional data

Below you see a first screenshot of the user interface. As the tool is not finished yet (actually the buttons have no functions yet at this moment), things might change a bit. I will keep you informed about the progress.