Hierarchy Viewer becomes Hierarchy Editor

The Hierarchy Viewer of ModelConverterX has been renamed to Hierarchy Editor now. As the new name suggests you can now also make changes in this editor.

I have added support to change the visibility condition and mouse rectangle of nodes now in this editor. If you click on the name of the currently assigned value, you will get a drop down box where you can select which visibility condition or mouse rectangle you want to use. The content of this drop down box is based on your ModelDef.xml file. If you select the top item named “None” from the list, then the node will have no visiblity condition or mouse rectangle assigned.

So this allows you to add, remove or change those items for each node of your model. Hopefully this is a useful addition and if there are other suggestions on how to improve the hierarchy editor just let me know.

Image2015-10-04 1214.27.954

Release candidate

release-candidateI have just put a release candidate of the Autogen Configuration Merger tool on the FSDeveloper forum. So if you are interested please test this version as well, hopefully there are no more bugs and a formal release will be there soon.

All details are in the forum post, but basically all I need to finish are the manuals. The last version has an installation mode that will make sure the tool gets properly installed.

Time

time_travelThe last year has been very busy, with the moving to a new house, the renovation of that house and the birth of our second child. But even now that things have become a bit more normal again, I still notice that I have much less time than before.

A few weeks ago our oldest child was staying with my parents for a few days, and suddenly we noticed how much easier it was with only one child at home. There was suddenly a lot more time in the evenings to spend on hobbies and other things.

So it’s just a fact that I’m quite short on time for my flightsim hobbies most of the time. In a typical week I can sit down 2 or 3 times behind my FS development PC for maybe an hour or so (that’s the amount of time I would spend on the hobby per evening before). Luckily I can read the forums from my smartphone as well.

So quite often I think fixing this bug or adding this feature shouldn’t be that much work, I’ll have it done in a few days. But when it’s finally done a month has passed again most of the time. So development is going a bit slower than I would want sometimes and there isn’t always the time to work on the ideas I have in my mind.

Let me be clear, I’m not complaining about this situation. Because I do also enjoy the new activities that I now (have to) do in the time I could spend on flightsim before. It’s great fun to spend time with the children and see how they develop. I just wanted to share this with you, so that you understand better why things sometimes go a bit slower. And hopefully when the children are a bit older, there will be more hobby time again…

Windows 10

Windows-10I guess nobody has missed that Microsoft released Windows 10 recently. I have upgraded my development laptop as well and things seem to be running fine. Until now I haven’t encountered conversion issues with any of my tools yet, they all seem to be working fine.

ModelConverterX uses OpenGL, so make sure you have the latest Windows 10 driver for your graphics card installed, but that’s the only feedback I got from some users.

So upgrading to Windows 10 seems save, from my tools point of view. I also haven’t had trouble with running FSX (Steam Edition) and the other development tool I often use. But of course I’m not running the tools of a typical flightsimmer, so don’t base your decision to upgrade as well only on my advice 😉

Hierarchy viewer filtering

I have added some extra functionality to the hierarchy viewer of ModelConverterX in the last two days. This feature to allow filtering in all the nodes was on the wishlist for quite a while already and since I needed it to debug an issue I have now finally added it.

The filtering can be done in two ways. First there is the checkbox in the toolbar to only show nodes of the active LOD. When this checkbox is off, all nodes of the model are shown. When it is selected only the nodes of the currently shown LOD in the preview are shown. So if you are looking for issues in a specific LOD this will help to narrow down the amount of nodes to check.

The second way to filter the nodes is even more powerful and that is the search box that you can now also find in the toolbar. If you type any text in this search box only nodes will be shown that match this text. The search is done in material names, animation names, visibility condition names and mouse rectangle names. The picture below shows the default Cessna 172 model where only the rudder parts of the active LOD are shown.

Image2015-08-17 1712.26.781

If you clear the search text after you have found the right node, that node will still be selected in the total scenegraph, so that should make it easier to evaluate the parent and child nodes of that specific node.

The isolate button at the toolbar is also new and it will isolate the selected node. What this means is that it will make the selected node the new root node of the model and prune all other nodes. This can be quite destructive so use with care.

Reading autogen configurations

I have changed the way the autogen configurations are read into scenProc. From tomorrow the development release will use the Flight Toolkit SimProp library to read the autogen configurations, instead of using spb2xml in the background to decompile to XML.

This change should not really be noticeable, since the new approach should return the same information for the auto completion. While switching to the new library I have also improved the way the autogen configuration is read a bit, so it should be even more stable. But if you notice any issues with the development release, just let me know.

Cell attributes and some other changes

Now that the stable release of scenProc is out, I can finally put some changes I have been working on in the past weeks in the development release. So here is a quick update of the things that I have added today:

  • The CamelCase step names I talked about before have been introduced. There is an option in the options to use UPPERCASE if you like that more.
  • Gridcells can now also have attributes. Before only features could have attributes, but cells can now also. These are now used to filter which cells should be assigned a texture or height settings. Obviously you also need steps then to add these cell attributes, three options are available now: AddCellAttribute, AddCellAttributeFeatureCount, AddCellAttributeIfInside. Hopefully the names speak for themselves, and else check the help tooltip.
  • You can compare two attributes in a filter now. Before you could only say attr>10, but now you can also say attr1>attr2.
  • And probably some other small changes I have forgotten about now…

Especially the changes in the second bullet can mean that you old script doesn’t work as before anymore. So be careful to check your script when updating to this release.

scenProc 1.0 released!

balloon-bouquetIt’s party time! The release of the first stable version of scenProc is there, I have just put scenProc 1.0 online.

Obviously it’s based on the latest development release, if you download the stable release now you will notice the main difference is the completed manual.

Now that I have a stable release out, I can go ahead and implement some of the changes I have planned for scenProc. These will change how certain things work and might give some discussion initially, but that’s why I think it’s good to have a stable release to fall back to in case of emergency.

So let’s celebrate this release now and from tomorrow I’ll continue to improve this tool in the 1.1 development release.