Seasonal textures in the Ground Polygon Wizard

About a week ago I already wrote about the new functionality I was working on for the ModelConverterX Ground Polygon Wizard. Now I have finished it and from tomorrow it is available in the development release. Since there is no manual for this tool yet, let me explain how to add night textures or seasonal textures to your ground polygons while converting.

Most of the process has not changed. So you still select the file you want to import. The gridview in the middle will then show all materials found in your object. In this view you will see two extra columns. One is for night textures and the other is for seasonal textures. So if you check the checkbox that type of texture is added to the material. For the night textures the default suffix to the texture name is _LM. For the seasonal textures the suffixes are _SP for spring, _FA for fall, _WI for winter and _HW for heavy winter. Summer gets no suffix, as that is the normal texture.

You will also see the “Define seasons” button. If you click on this you get the image shown below. This allows you to specify at which day of the year the different seasons start. If you want to know how to determine the seasons of the mesh scenery, have a look at this article on the FSDeveloper Wiki. I have tried to make this form as user friendly as possible, it should automatically make sure that if you change one day, the matching day of the next or previous season also changes.

I hope this new functionality is useful. And if there are any bugs and suggestions on how to make it easier please let me know.

ModelConverterX preview and FSX material settings

I have updated the preview in ModelConverterX. It now uses more of the FSX material settings while rendering. More concrete this means that the framebuffer blend and alpha test function options in the material are now displayed in the preview correctly. So you should get a better idea of how your model will look in FSX. I have not tested all combinations, but it should be how FSX will also display them. Some settings really give funny results, I am not sure if there is a useful way to use them yet.

Microsoft Flight forum closed on FSDeveloper

We have decided to close the Microsoft Flight forum we had on FSDeveloper. The reason for this is that we are a developer oriented forum and at the moment there is not much to discuss about development for Microsoft Flight. Therefore most discussing going on in that forum was gossiping, rumours and guessing. This often turned into heated discussions, not in the friendly tone we like to have in the FSDeveloper community.

Therefore we have closed the forum now. If you want to gossip about Microsoft Flight there are enough other places on the internet to do so. When there is enough information to discuss development for Microsoft Flight, we will of course allow this again on FSDeveloper.

Ground Polygon Wizard: night and seasons

In the last few days I have been working on the last missing feature of the Ground Polygon Wizard of ModelConverterX, the option to add night and seasonal textures from the wizard. This work is not completely done yet, but the part that generates the actual code is done. I just need to finish the graphical user interface and do some more testing. So hopefully I can release this feature in a couple of days. On the right is a small preview of how the user interface will probably look. For each material you can specify with a checkbox if it needs a night texture or seasonal textures as well. Just like you specify the layer and visibility range.

FSDeveloper emails

It seems that we have a few issues at the FSDeveloper website with sending emails. We are investigating these issues now. So if you tried to register a new account and don’t get an email confirmation this can be the cause. If you have trouble with this, please contact us and we’ll try to help you.

Bug fix in Ground Polygon Wizard

A little while ago a user reported problems with the Ground Polygon Wizard. When slicing the polygons, some polygons were missing. I have now debugged and fixed this issue. From tomorrow the improvements are available in the development release. So if you are using the Ground Polygon Wizard please update to this version, the previous version can deform or loose some of your polygons.

Bye bye MVP

Since 2006 I was lucky to get an email every April 1st telling me that I had been awarded a MVP award for that year. But this year I have not been so lucky, I got a message my award has not been continued. So thanks to Microsoft of the opportunity of being an MVP for those years.

Of course this won’t influence my FS activities at all. I will still continue doing what I enjoy doing, making tools for scenery designers, trying to find the limits of FS and running the FSDeveloper community.

RGB reader updated

I have made some updates to the RGB texture loader of ModelConverterX. The first one is a bug fix for textures that are not square and the second one is added support for RLE compression in the RGB textures. With this the most commonly used RGB textures should be read by ModelConverterX.

For those not familiar with RGB textures, this is a texture format designed by SGI that is usually used for OpenFlight models. So with this expansion of the RGB texture loader it should be even easier to convert your OpenFlight models to FSX or Prepar3D. The mass texture editor can now take care of the texture conversion from RGB to DDS.

Drawcall minimizer bugfix

I have just fixed some bug in ModelConverterX, to be more precise in the drawcall minimizer functionality. The bug was that when an object has LODs, the drawcall minimizer did not work correctly. This has been fixed now. This bugfix will be available in the development release from tomorrow.

Basic version OpenFlight reader available

Yesterday I already wrote about the OpenFlight reader for ModelConverterX. Today I have been testing this new reader with some additional models and I have just added the functionality to the development release. So from tomorrow you can give it a try. Besides the models I exported from ModelConverterX itself, I also tried it with some sample models I found on the internet. As you can see in the picture below these also import now.

I called it a basic version because I know there are still some OpenFlight nodes that will not work correctly. The most important of these are the Switch and DOF nodes. Once I get some test models with these nodes in them I will update the functionality further.