SceneryDesign.org When developing my tools I often have to choose between implenting a functionality myself or using a third party library that provides it. Both approaches have their pros and cons of course. When coding something yourself you possibly reinvent a wheel that somebody else already did. But on the other hand it gives you more […]
Build server update
I have updated to a different build server today. I won’t bother you with all the technical details, but this means that I use different software now to create the development releases of my tools automatically at night. For you as a user nothing changes, all download links stay they same. It’s only the build […]
Oops, I broke it (again)
With the last development release of ModelConverterX, I by accident broke some functionality again. FS2004 BGL files gave an error on import. Of course I have fixed this bug quickly again, but still it’s annoying that this sometimes happens. Why does this happen now and then? Basically because it’s almost impossible for me to test […]
Build server changes
Related to the move of this website to the new server, I also had to make a few changes to the build server that I use to make the development releases. I’ll just start with an overview of the main changes, below I will explain in a little more detail how my build process works. […]
BGLComp SceneryObject flags
A few days ago I added support to ModelConverterX to read the additional options like <NoShadow /> or <NoAutogenSuppresion /> from the object placement code in the BGL file. Initially I had some trouble to find out where these options ended up in the binary code, since it was not documented in the otherwise excelent […]
Dot vs. comma again, argh…
This must one of the most annoying “features” of the FS SDK tools. Many of them only work correctly when the decimal character is set to a dot. For example MakeMDL or XtoMDL refuse to work correctly when the decimal character is a comma. Many developers bump into this problem, since a lot of countries […]
64 bit version
Until now all of my tools were 32 bit, so even if you we’re running them on a 64 bit OS you could not access the additional memory. Especially for scenProc that was an annoying limitation, so today I took another look at making them 64 bit as well. In the end it turned out […]
Better performance for line intersection calculations
Today I was “playing” a bit with a profiler on ModelConverterX. This gave some interesting insights in how often certain functions are called or how much time is spend in certain functions. One of the things I noticed was that while loading SCASM API macros the triangulation of the polygons took relatively a lot of […]
LOD Creator improvements
The functionality in ModelConverterX to create lower level of detail versions of a model was running very slow for complex objects. I have not fixed that completely (yet), but I have made some changes to this functionality that should at least make it easier to work with. The calculation that simplifies the object is now […]
Unions
You could say that recently unions have played a role in my life. First there has been my wedding one and a half week ago of course, forming a nice union between me and my wife. But that is not what I want to talk about in this blog post. I have also been working […]