At the FSDeveloper forum there was a question about the size of crashboxes in FSX. These are often not so accurate around your object and that can give trouble with the aircraft crashing too early. So the question was how to change that? I did not know the answer, but I found it. There is an undocumented option in XtoMDL that lets you specify the granularity of the crashboxes.

/CRASHGRANULARITY:1.0

That’s the additional parameter you can specify for XtoMDL. The granularity seems to be given in meters. If you don’t specify this option you get a crashbox of 8x8x8 cells. This seems to be the minimum as well. If you specify a lower granularity you get more cells, but they will still be a power of two. So you don’t always get the exact resolution you want.

The more detailed the crashbox, the more it will influence the performance I guess, but I haven’t tested yet how big this effect is. Below you see three screenshots of an object with no granularity specified and with a granularity of 1.0 and 0.25. The difference is quite obvious.

So I think I need to fire up my IDE and add this new parameter to ModelConverterX now…