Ending the rumours?

It for sure was an interesting week with the new announcements Microsoft made about Flight. Will it end all the rumours that have been going around for a long time already? Let’s see.

The new announcement makes a lot of things more clear. Flight will have an integrated addon market and it is focussed around Hawaii. So those rumours were correct. The fact that it is free is something new. You will get 2 planes and one island of Hawaii for free. If you want more planes or more regions to fly in you can buy them in the market place. The announcements also seem to make clear that it is much more a game than hard core FS users are used to. It seems there are no jet planes included by default for example and the limited region also restrains serious IFR flying it seems.

Is this all bad? Another trend often mentioned is that the average FS users is getting older. Look at events like the FSWeekend in the Netherlands, the audience seems to get more grey hairs every year. So even if Flight seems not to be the “game” for the hard code FS user, it might interest more young people for flight simulation. Some of these might in the end even enlarge the already existing community around FS2004 and FSX.

The integrated market place is also not necessary a bad thing, since it makes it a lot easier for users to find existing addons. It is only a small portion of the people who bought FSX that found the addon communities on the internet. So an integrated market place might even increase sales. But it depends a lot on two things: how open is the platform for addons and what are the conditions of the market place.

For the last one it seems from the current reactions on the internet are that most existing payware addon developers are not happy with the proposed fees for using the Flight market place. And there is no official information at all whether freeware contributions to it will be possible. Although I have seen remarks that the market place would mean the end to freeware as we know it. If that would be the case, I think that would be a very bad move. I think the freeware addon community is the heart of the success of FS. Almost every developer has started in the freeware community, making small contributions to the FS world. So I would go as far as to state that without the freeware community, the payware addon community can not thrive either. So given the information available at the moment, it seems doubtful that the Flight market place will enable the kind of ecosystem of fans and developers that FS2004 and FSX have currently.

The second part is the openness of the platform for addons. I have seen hardly any information on that subject yet. One article mentions there will not be a SDK at all, but that seems hard to believe given the fact that there will be additional content to buy. But even if there would be a public SDK, that does not mean that the platform is also open and flexible enough to let addon developers do their work. For the previous FS versions the default aircraft and scenery were always just OK, but the platform was open enough to allow addon developers to make the great scenery and aircraft that we are all used to now. At this moment it is still unclear Flight can provide such a platform.

So did the announcement stop all rumours? I think not. At least it seems to have started loads of new discussions. Within the existing community Flight does not seem to get a very warm welcome. For me personally, as a (freeware) addon developer, I can say that given the current information it does not sound to me like an interesting platform to make addons and tools for. But who knows Microsoft might surprise us with a superb SDK, a very flexible engine and a market place that also accepts freeware contributions?

And in case I am too optimistic with those thoughts, we always have FSX which is still a great platform. We can still continue to build addons and improve it for years to come. So even if Flight is not our cup of tea, nothing is lost, we still have FSX. And there are also Prepar3D (which has improved the FSX engine) and X-Plane to keep an eye on. I think it will be interesting times ahead for addon developers. With or without Flight…

Follow me

Last week I finished the model of the new railroad bridge near Zwolle for the NL2000 scenery. It was the first bridge model I made with SketchUp and it was an interesting experience. As most modelling tools SketchUp provides a lot of operators and I had not used all of them in my previous objects. One of the tools I have learned to appreciate more with this bridge is the follow me tool. As you can see in the screenshot below the bridge is partly curved and there is also a small side road (of course a bicycle path here in the Netherlands). So how did I make this all?

I started with the main structure of the bridge, that crossed the actual river. I used a photo taken for the side to trace the correct shape of this part of the bridge. Afterwards I extruded it to get the right depth and cloned it to get the other side. Then I drew the railroad between these two structures. Now the follow me tool became useful. Because there is also a big part of the bridge that goes over the floodplains of the river. And these parts where partly curved. Besides that there are slopes for the trains to slowly increase their height above the terrain. For these parts I first drew a (curved) line for the right path and then used the follow me tool to extrude the railroad and the sides of the bridge along that path. To add the side road I also used the follow me tool again. I just drew the contour of it and then “follow me”-ed it along the entire bridge.

At the bottom you can see a screenshot of the finished bridge in the scenery.

Happy 2012!

I would like to wish everybody a happy 2012! Let’s hope this is going to be an interesting year again for FS addon developers. I think the signs are quite good, with Microsoft Flight around the horizon and X-Plane 10 as a promising platform as well. Let’s see where that all goes during this year.

As usual I am also full of ideas for my own tools. I hope to continue the experimentation with scenProc and autogen for example. And also for ModelConverterX there are loads of ideas left on my wishlist and I would like to release a new stable version this year as well, since the latest stable version and the development release are quite far apart now.

But on the other hand I also know that I will have less time to development these tools or spend on FS in general. That’s because 2012 is also going to be a happy year on the more personal point of view. We are expecting our first child in a couple of months. So all together it should become a very interesting year, I would say.

It’s the scale, stupid

While working on the next update of the NL2000 scenery, I have learned some interesting things again. For this update I have worked on the road bridges we have in the scenery. These objects have been in the scenery a couple of versions already, but with the road traffic that FSX has added it became quite clear that the cars were not driving over the bridge, but through it. The solution for this was to add a platform to the road surface of the bridge. Adding the platform was easy, that could be done with ModelConverterX in a few seconds. But to my surprise that did not always give the desired result.

For many of the bridges the cars were now flying through the air. How comes? It turned out this was because the bridge had been placed with a scale smaller than 1. The road traffic is using the platforms as they are when the bridge is placed with scale 1. So in this case the platform was too big, hence the cars in the air. These bridges have been placed with the small scale, because they were designed in the time that integer vertices in SCASM made it necessary to use small scales to be able to have detailed objects.

So once I understood that, the solution was quite easy. All I had to do was scale the bridge in ModelConverterX as well, so that it could be placed in the scenery with a scale of one. That means that in the next update of the scenery we will have some nice road traffic using our bridges.

A few days later a related problem occurred. In a certain area all of the autogen trees were suppressed, but there was no big object nearby that could cause this. After some searching we found out that it was once again a bridge with a small scale. Guess what? The autogen was suppressed in the area covered by the bounding box of the object at scale 1, even though we placed it in the scenery with a smaller scale. So once again the solution was to scale the object in ModelConverterX and update the placement to use scale 1.

So what was the lesson of this all? You’d better use scale 1 for all your objects. Not doing so can give some quirky results in FSX.

Small DrawCallMonitor update

I have just made a small update to the DrawCallMonitor tool. The change is that the user interface now has a status bar that will show you some additional information. The two main things are does this object have drawcall batching and does it have working levels of details. These two are related, but with this update you can quickly see how your object will perform. If the levels of details will not work, the text is red, if they will the text is green. Similar for the drawcall batching.

Quite some news

I haven’t posted much to this blog recently, because some other things kept me busy. Had a business trip for work, spend some time preparing for the Sinterklaas celebration tradition we have in the Netherlands, etc. But there has been quite some exiting news recently that I want to share with you all.

Flight beta

Microsoft has announced that the beta testing of Microsoft Flight will start next month. That’s interesting news, let’s hope it will be a good platform for addon developers again. The even better news is that you can apply now to be part of the beta testing. So if you want to help removing some bugs and making it a better simulator this is your chance.

SketchUp update

Google has announced an update for SketchUp. Two things from the announcement seem especially interesting for FS developers using SketchUp. The first is that the COLLADA exporter has been improved to be more compliant with the standard. I am going to test soon if ModelConverterX can still process the current output correctly. Another interesting improvement is that the filenames are now preserved when exporting. I think that could help FS developers a lot, since that would mean you don’t have to rename those texture0, texture1, etc all the time.

X-Plane

A demo version of X-Plane 10 has been released and the official release is scheduled within a few days. I haven’t tried the demo yet, but from the screenshots it looks like a very interesting platform. I am a little surprised it was release so quickly after the FSWeekend, since the demo we saw there was not so stable yet. Reading on the internet it seems the demo also got some mixed reactions. Especially this announcement on their blog tells me I probably better wait a few more patches before I start exploring making addons for X-Plane 10.

Library Creator XML 3.0 beta available

A first release of the new Library Creator XML 3.0 is now available, you can get it as part of the development releases of my tools. The main changes are in the user interface, I hope the tool is even easier to use. Another reason for the changes is that with the changes I made now it will be easier to add new features in the future. One feature high on my list is being able to import a library from BGL. So that will come in a future update. I made a quick video to illustrate the new version:

Updating the batch functionality

In the last week or so I got two requests to make small modifications to the batch convert functionality of ModelConverterX. But instead of just making these small changes, I have decided to give this functionality a bigger update (that was something I had in mind already). My goal is to make the batch convert more flexible. With the new user interface, of a which a screenshot is shown below, you will get the following extra functionality:

  • Ability to process input files from different folders.
  • Add operators to perform additional actions on the object being converted. An example of this can be adding an empty LOD, adding a night texture to each material or changing the GUID. I will design this functionality so that I can very easily add additional actions in the future as well.

Let me know if there are more ideas to improve the batch functionality, I might be able to include them with this update.