Some bad news and some good news (and some more bad news)

Let me start with the bad news, I have decided to stop the development of gPoly for the moment. It seems developing two tools, ModelConverterX and gPoly, at the same time does not work that well. I don’t have enough time available to turn gPoly into a stable and usable tool at the moment. Maybe in the future I will continue on the development.

While working on gPoly I have learning a lot of interesting things, about using GeoTIFF images, about doing boolean operations on ground polygons or about Bezier curves. The good news is that not all of this knowledge goes into the fridge together with the gPoly tool. I have decided to add a ground polygon wizard to ModelConverterX. So this mean you can import a MDL file into ModelConverterX, determine the layering of the textures and then export to a BGL file with the FS2002-style ground polygons. And you don’t need to do any ASM file tweaking for this at all. Actually you don’t need to have the FS2002 gamepack at all.

At the moment I got the basics of the wizard working. You can apply the layers and export the ground polygons. The only part that is not working yet is the code to automatically slice polygons into sections of 100 meters. This is required for FSX.

And now the last part of (bad) news. This new functionality is not yet available in the development release. I had hoped to finish it last weekend, but ran out of time. Since we go on vacation in a few weeks, you will have to wait another month for it. But I didn’t think it is a good idea to release some untested functionality, even to the development release just before my vacation.

Convert Wizard update

I have released an update of the ModelConverterX Convert Wizard functionality. The main changes are:

  • There is now also an option to combine textures while converting, thereby reducing the amount of drawcalls
  • Before starting the conversion the wizard now checks if all compilers (like BGLComp and XtoMDL) can be found. If not the user will get a clear message box to remind that these settings have to be provided first.
  • I have also fixed some other smaller bugs in the wizard.

I hope the wizard proves to be useful to users who just want to convert and place a few objects. If there are any suggestions on how to make it more useful, please let me know.

Just for clarity, this wizard is for scenery objects only. It is not a wizard to convert aircraft models between different FS version or something like that. It can convert scenery objects and place them at a certain location in the world.

FSDeveloper server move – status update 2

A little update about the server now. The databases and other content (like attachments) have been migrated successfully. We have performed a test on the new server and everything seems to be working fine. So the next step is to point the domain to the new server and update the DNS. We are currently working on that. This should hopefully be finished soon as well, so that you can reach the new server. I’ll post another update once that is done.

ModelConverterX Convert Wizard

Today I have added a new feature to the ModelConverterX development release, the convert wizard. This function makes it even easier to convert and place an object into Flight Simulator. I have added this feature mainly with the novice developer in mind. Somebody who just wants to add a few objects to Flight Simulator. Even for such a task multiple tools are often needed. You might model it in SketchUp, then you convert it to a MDL file with ModelConverterX, place it in a library with Library Creator XML and finally position it at the correct location with WhisPlacer. That are quite some tools for such a simple task.

With this feature I have tried to reduce the amount of tools neeed. So ModelConverterX can place the object as well at a certain location and directly put the BGL file and the textures in your scenery project.

I have made a demonstration video to show you how this new feature works. Feel free to try it and give me feedback on how to make it even more user friendly. I know there are still some rough edges in this feature, which I hope to iron out in the coming weeks.

ProFlightSim – a warning

You might have read this on other blogs already. For example Francois and Lefteris wrote about this already, but I feel it is too important to not repeat it here as well.

There is a “new” flight simulator that is being marketed currently. The ads promise that it is the best out there and even beats FSX. Did we all miss some new development or is there another side of the story? It turns out that this “new” simulator is actually a commercial version of FlightGear. So the marketing is a bit misleading, to say the least. Be aware of that.

FSDeveloper connectivity – part 4

This Sunday, November 28th, we plan to move the FSDeveloper website to another server. This move is necessary to fix the connectivity problems we had a couple of weeks ago. We have already tested that the site runs fine on the new server.

So what we will do Sunday is close the site on the current server. Then we will copy the database with all the current information to the new server. Afterwards we will point the domain to the new server. This whole process should take a few hours.

We will start with this work at 17:00 CET on Sunday. So expect that the FSDeveloper forum will be unavailable at that moment.