SceneryDesign.org Over the last days I worked on the ModelConverterX LOD Creator tool. My first aim was to add another algorithm to calculate the LODs. And besides that I also improved the user interface a bit. On the right you see a screenshot of the new user interface and since the manual is not yet updated, […]
scenery.org
Ever since I started making scenery for Flight Simulator, you could get almost any tool you wanted using scenery.org. That site provided a great overview of tools and tutorials for scenery designers. Sadly last week the site went offline. This did not come as a huge surprise, since the owner Tom Gregor had already indicated […]
Black textures
An often occurring problem when designing scenery is that your object shows with black (or no) textures. There can be many causes for this. For example a texture that is not a power of two in size, a texture that is in the 24 bit BMP format that FS can not read or just a […]
Attached object orientation
For quite some time already ModelConverterX has the functionality to attach things to your object. For example an effect or another library object. I mainly used this to attach lights to objects and since these shine in any direction I never really bothered to check the orientation properly. Until there were some questions about this […]
Normal maps for FSX
Today I was experimenting a bit with using normal maps and bump maps in gPoly. So this meant I had to make some bump maps and while doing so it bothered me again that you have to transform the output of the normalmap plugins to work correctly in FSX. Maybe it is my GIMP skills, […]
gPoly status update #11
I have made some progress again on the gPoly tool. The two main features I worked on today are finishing the Bezier curves and extending the user interface so that you can edit the texture mapping of the polygons. Since these feature are difficult to explain with text or pictures, I have made a little […]
NL2000 v4.0 release
Over the last three years the NL2000 team has been working hard on making their scenery compatible with FSX and many improvements have been made to the scenery during these years as well. Tonight was finally the moment of the release, the new version is now available for downloading. Given the huge size of 32 […]
gPoly status update #10
This evening I have been working on a feature for gPoly that will make it a lot easier to draw curved edges of your ground polygons. By using Bezier curves you don’t have to add many points to get a nice smooth curve. All you have to do is set the begin and end point […]
ModelConverterX 1.2 released
A new stable version of ModelConverterX has been released. Especially for users converting COLLADA and SketchUp objects this should mean that they can use the stable version again. Since version 1.1 I changed so much, that we always had to tell those users that they needed the development release. Have a look at this post […]
gPoly status update #9
Just a quick status update for the gPoly tool. I think I got the code working now that will ensure that your polygons are automatically sliced into segments of no more than 100 meter. This ensures that there will be no issues with the curve of the earth in FSX. The same code can also […]