LiveMeeting – part 2

About a week of two ago, Nick and I played a little bit with Microsoft Office LiveMeeting. Back then we saw a potential to use this technique for some online, interactive tutorials as well. So tonight we did another test and this time Thorsten joined in as well to see how well everything worked from the perspective of a normal user.

In the beginning we had some trouble to get all the audio working correctly. For example when using the webclient, it seemed not possible to listen to the broadcasted audio. So it took us some time before we could all three hear each other and see the desktop being shared for the tutorial. But once that was working, we tried different kind of tutorials to see how looked to the other attendees. Like showing doing animations in GMax or using the CAT tool.

In the end it was a really useful session (and also a lot of fun I must say) and we learned some useful things we can use for the real LiveMeeting tutorial as well. One thing we learned is that the GMax screen might be too complex to use for a first LiveMeeting tutorial, so we decided that the first meeting will be about the MDL Tweaker II tool and it is scheduled for Thursday 27th July at 21:00 CET now. So we hope to see you there then.

Back in my computer room

A few weeks ago I wrote my shower leaking a little water and that my
room where I have my computers was in danger of getting a little wet.
So since then my house has been a sort of a mess, with books piled up
all over my living room and bedroom and with the computer standing on
the dinning table.

In the mean time I let the computer room dry up and replaced the
sealant of the shower. But the carpet and the wallpaper did not look
very nice anymore after drying up, so with some help from my father we
replaced these two today.

This means that I can finally move all my stuff back into the room and
have my usual desk again for all my computer/scenery design work. At
the moment I am still putting all my books back, etc. But in a day or
so I should be fully running again (and the dinning table will be
available again to eat from).

Log it!

There is a new feature in the latest MDL Tweaker II release that I did not yet point out. This new feature is the event log screen. When there is a warning or an error this will be the place to look for the message.

The image above shows three warnings for missing textures. So whenever your preview seems to miss some textures, have a look at the Event log first to see if there were problems loading them. You can find the Event log in the Window menu.

To be honest, at the moment the warnings for missing textures are the only ones written to the event log, but in the future other messages will be placed here as well. For example about tweaks you have applied or problems that happened when applying them. I do plan to make the event log appear automatically when an error occurs, while you should open it manually for warnings. But that is something for the future, for now if you miss textures, check the log.

Complex conditions

Last weekend I released a new version of MDL Tweaker II and in this blog post I want to point out a few of the improvements of this version. The feature that has been improved most is the condition manager. Not only has the user interface changed, hopefully it is even easier to use now, but also the types of conditions you can apply has been extended. In the previous version multiple conditions on the same object always meant that all these conditions had to be true, for the object to display. But this new version does also allow other combinations of multiple conditions. For example one of the conditions must be true, none of the conditions must be true, or one of the conditions must not be true.

This can for example be useful if you want to display an object between minute 45 and 15 of the hour. As this passes the 60 minute border, this condition would become either the minute is between 45 and 60 OR it is between 0 and 15. With the new condition manager that is now possible.

Another nice improvement is the preview window. Instead of using buttons to zoom, there is now a slider where you can set the amount of zoom. This should be a lot easier to use (in the end I would prefer to use the mousewheel for the zoom, but at the moment trying to get that to work makes the tool just to unstable). And another improvement of the preview is the overal speed of drawing it. In the previous version this was often CPU limited, while I have now optimized the OpenGL code more. So it should no longer eat all your CPU and rotations of complex objects go more smooth.

With all those improvements done, I hope to be able to put some effort in reading transformations and animations now, as that is an important area that MDL Tweaker can not yet read. Once I have some progress on that, you’ll certainly read it here again.

Awesome

I would like to point your attention to cool OpenSource project this time, OSSIM. At work we make use of this tool to mosaic different aerial images for example. But it can do a lot other image manipulating related tasks as well, like color matches between different images or reprojecting images to a different projection. So have a look at this awesome tool.

While reading the manual of OSSIM, I noticed that it should also be able to do image tiling. This could be a useful feature when trying to make the tiles for a high resolution ground layout. But I haven’t been able to get that feature working completely, I’ll make a new post about this once I got it fully working.

Live Meeting

While chatting with Nick today, we were looking for an easy way to show each other what we were doing on screen. For example to describe a bug or explain how we would like a feature to be. In the end Nick came up with a Microsoft Office Live Meeting test session and I must say that it worked great. It is a really helpfull tool when discussing things online. Being able to see how other people use the tools you have designed is also very useful, as it might not always be the way you thought people would use it.

But we do also see other cool things that we can do with Live Meeting, for example have a sort of online interactive tutorial session, where scenery design tools or techniques can be demonstrated, while people watch and ask their questions directly. Have a look at this thread at the SceneryDesign.org forum for a poll about this idea and hopefully we can do some trials with this idea soon.

Tool updating time

It was last friday that I had a nice chat with Nick once again (had
been some time ago) and in the process we came to talk about MDL
Tweaker as well. It seemed that Nick had not seen the latest beta version of that tool yet, so while chatting Nick started to test this version a bit. Of course he was able to produce some new bugs and errors for me very soon, as well as a lot of good ideas on how to improve features or the interface.

All these new ideas and suggestions, formed a very good motivation for me to do some coding work on MDL Tweaker right away. So this weekend I have been busy with implementing stuff from my wishlist. Once I have the remaining issues ironed out, you can expect a new beta release.

The most noticeable changes I have made until now deal with the object preview. First I have been able to make the drawing of the preview a lot faster. So where the CPU was often the limiting factor on drawing complex objects before, it now no longer is. Another important change is that the way the textures are searched has been changed. This means that loading the object will no longer take ages if the textures can not be found. Besides these two things, I have made a lot of other small changes as well, but you will have to wait for the release to see a full list of changes.

So thanks Nick, such chat sessions are really useful for the development of any tool. It really helps me to keep the end user in mind as well, as my own point of view on how the tool should works is often slightly different from what a average scenery designer would prefer.

Vliehors

I am back, hopefully the leakage has been fixed now (I still have the new sealant beneath my fingernails). I can’t say that I had much fun trying to fix the shower, now I know for sure that I am not really a do-it-yourselfer.

I can’t say that I did not have fun at all this last week, as I visited the shooting range of the Dutch airforce on the island of Vlieland. It was really cool to visit the control tower there and see the aircraft and helicopters fly by really close. We had a great day there, see the two photos below.

We did not only visit the range to watch the aircraft of course, we are also going to model it in the NL2000 scenery. So we took some good photos and notes for that as well. After all the repairing of my shower, I am really looking forward to spend more time on scenery design again this week.

Fixing a shower

I haven’t got much FS related to report at the moment, as almost all of my spare time is being spend on fixing my shower. Last week I noticed a little wet spot on the floor of my PC room and it turned out that the shower had slowly been leaking water into that room (which is next to the shower). As PCs don’t like wet feet in general, my first priority is now to fix this of course. So at the moment I am fighting with the old sealant, in an attempt to remove it. Once that is done applying some new to fix the leaking problem should be easy. And then I can finally spend some more time on FS stuff again as well, until then don’t expect me to be online very often.