Christmas is almost there, so I would like to take this opertunity to wish you all a Merry Christmas.

Of course I will spend the Christmas days with my family, but for the rest this time of year is a good opportunity to catch up with some of the things I want to do for a long time already. So those two weeks without having to go to work are already quite full with plans for things to do. I guess the best thing I could wish from Santa Claus (apart from the fact we already celebrated Sinterklaas, so no Santa for me) is some more time to spend on all this. Here is just an overview of some of the things I have in mind, don’t pin me down on this as I will probably not be able to finish it all:

• Finish a new version of ModelConverterX and release it. Over the last week I have been running a test project to convert the objects from a certain airport and that has resulted in a lot of improvements to the SCASM reader functionality of the tool. Once I can convert all objects I want to convert, I will release a new version.
• Add OpenFlight funtionality to the ModelConverterX tool. With my MDL Tweaker II tool I could already write out OpenFlight versions of my MDL objects. I want to add the same functionality to ModelConverterX. That would allow me to convert SCASM objects to OpenFlight and later also MDL objects when I can read them in again. And even more interesting I am also thinking about an OpenFlight reader, so that you can put OpenFlight models into FSX MDL objects.
• I want to study the SimConnect SDK a bit more, to get a better understanding of what can and cannot be done with it. As part of this I will probably try to write a little tool to drive FSX with external data (that could be useful later at work if we want to use FSX as a visual for our simulations).
• I want to look into the conditional display of scenery objects. At the DevCon in November I got some interesting suggestions that might allow (some) conditions to work again. As the MDL format does not allow it directly, most suggestions involve using Missions and/or SimConnect. So that will be two fields I will be diving into a bit.

As you can see the list is quite long, let’s see how far I can come. At least it seems I do not have to be bored during my Christmas holidays…