Changes to FSDeveloper forum structure

Today I will be making some changes to the forum structure. With time going on, how we make our addons has also changed slightly. For example when we started FSDeveloper more ASM tweaking was needed, but now that forum is not so active anymore. With these changes to the structure we want to make sure you can find what you are looking for quickly. Let me stress that we won’t remove anything, we might merge two categories or put a subforum in a different category.

I will post all the details once I am finished with the changes. For now this is just a warning that today you might notice that I am making these changes on FSDeveloper. So if you suddenly see a forum move, don’t worry, it’s me.

First version FXEditor released

I have just released the first beta version of the new FXEditor tool. With this tool you can edit the special effects of FS and it gives you an interactive preview while you are editing the effect. On FSDeveloper I have opened a new support forum for this tool. Especially take a look at the general information topic there, since it tells you where to download the tool and where to find the manual.

Make sure that you set the path to your FS version in the options before using the tool, as else certain parts will not work correctly.

This is a first beta version, so not all effects will render correctly at the moment. I am aware of the following limitations at the moment:

  • The preview tries to render the effect as close to FS as possible, but this might still need some tuning.
  • The tool will play the sound of an effect as well, but when you load a controller effect it will currently only play the sound of the first effect, not of others.
  • Effects that are extruding along lines, like the waves, are not supported by the tool at the moment.

Let me know if you have problems with certain effects or if you have other suggestions to improve the tool. I have two items on my wishlist already:

  • Remember recently opened files, so that they can be reloaded quicker.
  • Add user editable templates for new effects. That way you can get a suitable template when creating a new effect.

ModelConverterX special effects update now available

I have just put a new development release of ModelConverterX online. The main change in this version is that it is now possible to visualize special effects in the 3D preview as well. So if you are placing such an effect, you will be able to preview how it is going to look in FS. Next to the paperclip button that toggles the display of attachpoints, you will find a new button now that toggles the display of the particle effects.

Since effect files reside in the effects folder of your FS installation, it is important that you make sure that the path to FS is set correctly in the options. The FS paths have moved from the texture settings to the FS related settings of the options in this new version. If your registry keys for FS are valid you don’t have to set it manually by the way.

Please be aware that this is a first beta release of the particle effect functionality. I tried to make the rendering of the effects as close to the way FS renders them, but I am sure there are still some bugs in there. So let me know if you have problems viewing certain effects or if you feel that the dynamics of the effect are wrong.

Special effects getting out of control!

I still remember how this started. I had made a video tutorial about adding effects to an object using ModelConverterX. One of the remarks on that tutorial was like “he would it not be nice if we can see the actual effect in the preview as well?”. Well, why not I thought, it should be fun to try to render the effects as well. So from that moment on the idea was spinning around somewhere in the back of my head.

I actually started coding it when I got back from vacation and after not that long I can render my first particle effect for a smoke stack. If you follow me on Facebook as well, you have probably seen the short videos of it I posted there. At the moment I think I can render the majority of the default special effects that come with FSX, although I am sure there will still be a few bugs in the rendering of them. Below is a screenshot of one.

The main thing I still need to do is add support of the controller effects, these are effects that call other effects again. For example the firework shows are setup using them. At the moment they can not yet be rendered. Once that is done I think I am close to releasing this feature for everybody to play with. I am sure you will find some bugs in certain effects, but I will be able to debug that much quicker once more people start testing and using this feature.

With this blog post I would also like to announce a new tool, FXEditor. You might already have seen in the screenshots that they are not from ModelConverterX. I made a small tool to help me develop and test the rendering of particle effects. At the moment the tool mainly loads the FX file and then renders it. But as you can see I have a text editing area in it already. In the future I want to make it an editor so that you can have a quick preview of edits you make to effect files.

It might take a little debug to make sure that the preview represents correctly how your effect will look in FSX later on, but I think that will be a fun way to develop FX files later on. At least I have a lot of fun with it now developing. I never realised that different kind of effects that come with FSX by default. In the last couple of days I have learned a lot already about how they work.

And as the icing on the cake I have also added a feature to hear the sound file associated with the effect. Especially the chickens of the barnstorm effect surprised the rest of the family here at home. Maybe I should add an option to not play the sound as well in the future.

OK, enough talking and screenshots for now (it is quite fun to view all the different effects). Tomorrow I will continue on the controllers and hopefully within a few days I can give this feature to the users for further testing.

Object Information form update

I have updated the Object Information form of ModelConverterX. Besides rearranging the information a bit, you can now also see and edit the placement information of the object on the form. This means you can see the latitude, longitude, heading and scale the object is placed at. If there is no placement yet, you can use the “Add position” button to create one.

At the moment only a few object readers will read placement information. So this information will be read only from the KMZ reader and from certain SCASM files. Also when exporting the placement information is not used by all exporters. Only the BGL exporter for FS2004 or FSX uses it at the moment.

If you click “Show map” button you will get a form with a map view, similar to the one used in the Convert and Place Object Wizard. This should make it easier to select the right placement for your object. I have also redesigned the Convert and Place Object Wizard a bit now, it will show the map in the same separate window as the Object Information form from now on.

ModelConverterX user interface update

I have just released another update of ModelConverterX, this time the changes mainly affect how the user interface works. I have made the code more modular, so that it is easier for me to develop. But this also has a benefit for you as end user. With this new design you can keep all editors and windows open. So for example the Object Information Form, the Material Editor and a Scale Editor can all be open at the same time.

Well, I hear you say, that is not really something new is it? I can do that in the old version as well. Yes, but the difference is that the content of those editors is now correctly updated when you perform an action in another editor. So for example the Material Editor will be updated correctly when you use the Drawcall Minimizer while the Material Editor is still open.

As you can probably understand these changes to the design meant that quite some code had to be edited. I did not find issues while testing it here, but please let me know if you find a function that no longer works or if you have other feedback.

X-Plane OBJ reader

I have added a new object reader to ModelConverterX, this time for the X-Plane OBJ format. From tomorrow this new reader will be available in the development release. I don’t have an extensive collection of test objects in the X-Plane format yet, so it might be not all commands are properly supported yet. But the reader should support the following features:

  • Reading geometry
  • Reading LODs
  • Reading animations
  • Most of the material/appearance attributes

Aircraft specific elements, like cockpit regions are not supported at the moment, since these can not be exported by ModelConverterX to any other format. If you find some additional commands that are not supported or have other feedback please let me know.

While testing with X-Plane OBJ files I also noticed that the DDS files that X-Plane uses are not vertically flipped like those in FSX (or should I say that they are vertically flipped while FSX is not). So I have added an option to ModelConverterX to determine if the DDS files should be flipped or not. When set to false FSX DDS files will read and show fine. So you might need to set it to true when reading X-Plane DDS files.

Initially I planned to release a X-Plane OBJ reader and writer at the same time. But as you can see this is only the reader. The writer has to be delayed a little bit, because the X-Plane OBJ format only allows you to use one texture per object. That would mean that most FS object would not be exported correctly anyway. I will first modify the drawcall minimizer a bit more, so that it can more aggressively reduce the object to only one texture. After that I will add a writer for the X-Plane OBJ format, so that object conversions can be done in both directions.

Back from Slovenia

The last two weeks I have on vacation, camping in Slovenia, but now I am back home again. I am still in the progress of cleaning, unpacking and storing all the camping stuff. But once that is done I hope to spend some time on flight sim things again. I have some cool features for ModelConverterX that I want to work on and of course I need to catch up with the FSDeveloper forum as well. So expect some more activity from me again in the next few days. The image below is lake Bled in Slovenia where we spend a couple of days.

How to deviate from your roadmap…

I usually keep a list of bugs and features that I want to work on first for ModelConverterX. This is sort of my roadmap to the next stable release. But as it goes with a hobby project like this, sometimes the fun things push you away from the planned roadmap. Let me give you an example.

Last week I made a video tutorial about placing effects using ModelConverterX. In some of the discussion that evolved after this a user, I won’t say it was you Bill, mentioned that it would be cool to have the actual effect also displayed in ModelConverterX. This was a nice idea of course and I think it was already somewhere on my todo list. So let’s just check that it is and go back to the higher priority items on the roadmap, right?

Well not really, this idea kept spinning around in my brain. I started reading the special effects part of the SDK again and searching with Google how to make a particle system. At this moment I even think that it shouldn’t be too hard to implement the display of the actual effect. So I’ll be heading back to my paper and pencils after I finish writing this blog post to work out the design a bit more.

And do I find this annoying? Well, not really. This is what makes it fun to make tools for FS. By such comments you get new ideas and all the time explore new parts of FS. I think I have a much better understand how effect file work now already. And once I have finished this feature I think I should understand them even more. So don’t feel guilty to mention such ideas in discussions. Just don’t hold your breath for the stable release, while I jump around to implement some of those cool ideas…… (did I hear somebody say X-Plane support there in the distance as well) ……..