See you in two weeks

My vacation is now really getting near. Tomorrow morning I will have to leave very early to get to Schiphol and fly to Malaga, Spain. I am really looking forward to get cycling again in an area that is not so extremely flat as the Dutch polder landscape I live in.

I have also been able to put an updated version of ModelConverterX online. It solves some of the problems the first alpha release had, so that should allow you to convert more objects without trouble. Of course it is still an alpha version, so I am sure you will be able to find some more bugs while I am away. But that is something for me to worry about when I get back.

So, see you in two weeks time and don’t expect me to reply to forum posts or emails until then.

Wat was waar

This title probably makes no sense to the non-Dutch readers, but it is the name of a website I came across today. On this website you can watch old maps and aerial photos of the Netherlands in a Google Earth style. And in this case with old I mean maps from the 19th century or aerial photos from the Second World War. So if that interests have a look at the site, I enjoyed it a lot browsing through it.

Vacation is getting nearer

It is Thursday morning now and I don’t have to work, that’s a nice feeling. Or maybe I should say I am not sitting in the office, as there is some hard work ahead. I’ll have to try to pack all my stuff for my vacation that starts this Monday. I am going to Andalusia (Spain) this year and just like last year I will be going to do a combination of cycling and camping again.

But where I travelled by bus last year, we are going to fly this time. So how do I get my sleeping bag, mattress, cycling helmet, and all those stuff you need in one bag of less than 20 kg? It is good that I have some time now to try how to get that done.

And the first alpha version of ModelConverterX has also resulted in the first bug reports, so I hope to get an updated version done before I leave. But let’s first pack all the stuff.

 

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.

ModelConverterX update

Remember the Starfighter screenshot in my previous ModelConverterX post? (If not, please scroll down a little bit). It had some nice pink wheels and a bright green canopy. This evening I have been able to fix these bugs and also export this old API static as a FsX MDL file and place it in FsX. Below you can see a screenshot of how it then looks.

 

 I have also started to make the interface a little more user friendly and remove some debugging features. Once that is done I will put a first beta (or should I say alpha) version on the website. So that those of you who dare to test this new tool can give it a try. Because I am sure that I need some feedback on crashes from your API macros to make the tool more robust. I hope to have this test version ready near the end of this week.
 

ModelConverterX progress report

After spending most of my spare time on the upcoming FsDeveloper update in the last two weeks, I was able to get some work done on the ModelConverterX tool again this evening. In my last update on this tool, I mentioned that the code to read the API macros needed some more work and that is what I worked on today. I have improved the reader now, so that it can better read the Fs2002 floating point style API macros (for example generated with FSDS2). Below you see a little screenshot of a F-104 Starfighter static I once made loaded into the tool.

 

As you will probably see some of the colours do look a little weird still (or would pink wheels be the new fashion colour?), so I still have a little work to do. But I feel that I am getting closer to releasing a test version of the tool that can actually do some useful conversion for the tester as well.

As I will be away the rest of this weekend, I won’t be able to get that test version ready in the next few days, so that will have to wait till next week. But at least you know now that there is a little bit of progress again. 

LibraryThing

I have quite some books (despite my not so old age). I guess if I keep collecting them at this pace I will need a bigger house soon to store them, or I might have to give up some more space in the living room. In the past I have tried some computer programs to catalog all the books I have, but I never found any that I found easy to work with.

But last week I read in the newspaper about a site called LibraryThing. As a test I entered about two shelves of my books and I think I like the site. It makes use of different online databases, so that makes finding the books based on for example the ISBN number quite easily. And you can also see how many other people on the site have the same book and the reviews they entered for it.

And they also have a cool widget that you can use to show your collection on your blog for example. So below you can see part of the books I already entered. So if you are looking for a way to catalog your books as well, check out this site.