SceneryDesign.org Now that everything is settled a bit again in the new house, I finally found some time again to do some programming. So the last evening I tried to continue on the 3DS exporter for ModelConverterX, that I had been working on before the moving. And the good news is that I was able to fix the last remaining bugs in it. So the basic exporter functionality is working now. See the screenshot below for the museum API that I use often to test ModelConverterX, here it has been exported as 3DS and then loaded into GMax.
Currently the exporter only deals with the geometry, so no animations or advanced features like that are written (besides from the fact that ModelConverterX can not even read these features yet, the exporter does also not support them at the moment). An exporter like this opens a whole new world of reuse of your old scenery objects, like API macros.
But there is also one possible problem with it, it does allow people to import and edit work that is not their own. In general developers do not like that, so I think I will have to consider how to release this functionality in such a way it is useful, but restricts people from doing “bad” things with. If anybody has an idea about that, please let me know as well.
This is stuff I’ve really been waiting for, simply because I’d love to convert some old scenery into being fully FSX compatible.
In regards to abusing this tool, I would guess that there aren’t that many people who could (getting scenery into 3dsmax and recompiling it takes skill). You’ll always get some idiots, but it would be a shame to let these guys spoil the party, because this converter could make many people happy (ie finally making ‘lost’ scenery working again).