Some autogen thoughts

I am going to spend some time on the scenProc tool again the coming weeks. It’s time to finish some of the features of that tool and make it even easier to make autogen. But of course there are some challenges left. One of the main challenges is that most FSX autogen must be rectangular. […]

User interface change

I have changed the main user interface of ModelConverterX a bit, actually it has gone back to some of the concepts that the tool used in 2008 already. I did remove the tabs that were used for the preview, event log and options. Instead of those tabs the options are now on a separate form, […]

Problem reporting

user: He, your tool does not work. me: What do you mean? What are you trying to do and what goes wrong? user: When I import my object it crashes. You need to help me, I have to convert this object. me: What is the error message you get at the crash? Can you maybe […]

Correcting for the FSX curved earth

One of the main differences between FS2004 and FSX when it comes to rendering the earth, is that FS2004 assumes that the earth is locally flat while rendering the scene, while FSX uses the correct curvature of the earth as well. But this has some consequences for scenery designers. When you make ground polygons they […]

Bye, bye, performance indicator mode

ModelConverterX used to have a render mode called performance indicator mode. With this mode you could spot where the texture mapping or normals were not so optimal. The recent updates to the preview have removed that mode. But I have now added two replacements. One is called the Normal Inspect mode and the other TexMap Inspect […]

A bit buggy

The recent changes I made to the ModelConverterX preview turn out to be a bit buggy. To be honest that’s not a surprise to me. I am still learning the OpenGL shader language and also the fact that every graphics card might handle the shader code slightly different does not make the job easier. But […]

Updated ModelConverterX preview

The development release of ModelConverterX now contains an updated preview of the objects. It is now using OpenGL shaders, which as enabled me to add some cool new functions. Like showing bump maps and the reflection influenced by specular maps. Be aware that this is a big change, so it might have resulted a few […]

Instant Object Studio

Flight1 has released a new tool, Instant Object Studio. This evening I had a play with the demo version and I must say I am surprised by the tool. After seeing the video I had the impression that the tool would be nice to make some quick buildings, but that it would be hard to […]

ModelConverterX 1.3 released

Just a quick note that ModelConverterX 1.3 (stable version) has been released. It is the same as the development version of yesterday, but now with a updated manual. It will be the stable release for the near future, since version 1.2 was getting very old. You can read some more information here.