SceneryDesign.org
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We are looking into this issue, together with the hosting company. Hopefully it will be resolved soon.
This evening I was working on a bug in the NL2000 scenery, the lighthouses did not have a light at night. It seemed that during the conversion to the FSX MDL format the attached effect was lost. Since adding I am too lazy to add all those effects by hand again, I added two new features to ModelConverterX.
You can now duplicate an attachpoint in the attached object editor. This can be useful if you need one attachpoint for day and night and another for dusk and dawn. In the effect parameter editor I have also added two more buttons to add the presets for day/night and dusk/dawn parameters.
Here is a quick status update for some of the projects I am working on. I know I have not blogged much recently. That is mainly because it is quite busy at my work recently, so that affects the amount of free time a bit. Unfortunately I don’t expect this will change very soon.
In order of priority the projects have for me at the moment, these are some of the things I am working on:
SketchUp tutorial
At the FSWeekend in November there will be a FSDeveloper stand again (like last year). This year I plan to let visitors try their luck on modelling scenery objects with SketchUp in the stand. With that in mind I have started working on a new tutorial that will explain in detail how to make your own house for FS using SketchUp. I want to have this tutorial ready before the FSWeekend.
gPoly
After a long time of no progress, I have been able to do some work on the gPoly tool again as well. Currently I am adding one more feature (drawing lines). When that feature is added I think there is enough functionality for a first public alpha version. Although I will need to polish some features a bit more to make them useful to other people than myself.
While working on gPoly, I am trying to follow the Test Driven Development (TDD) approach that I have been reading about recently. That turns out to be an interesting experiment and I hope it will result in easier to maintain software in the end.
ModelConverterX
Also for ModelConverterX there are still some open issues. These mainly deal with finishing the aircraft importer, especially the functionality related to the conditions under which certain parts display need to be made a little more user friendly.
Yesterday Paul Lange already dusted off his blog, which was an indication already that something was still going on. And then today Microsoft has announced Microsoft Flight. Not so much is know about this new simulator/game, but the teaser video looks interesting. Which is of course what any teaser would do. I guess we will have to wait and see what kind of product this is going to be and how similar it will be with the flight simulator products we are used to. On FSDeveloper a heavy discussion has started already about what this could mean. But it is good news to see that a new flight simulation product is being developed.
Today I have worked on two bugs in ModelConverterX that deal with levels of details and the FS2004 scenery MDL format. The first one I fixed is that levels of detail where not exported correctly to the FS2004 MDL format. This should be working again now.
The second one is reading the levels of detail from the MDL file. This bug is almost solved, the reader will now read the different levels of detail. However the number calculated for the different levels of detail are not yet correct. I still need to figure out the exact math to determine them. The numbers calculated now are close to the actual values though.
Over the last days I have made good progress again with reading aircraft MDL files. I should directly say that not all of them will import correctly at this moment, but more and more are working. And also setting the conditions to extract a landing gear or set the flaps is working much better now. I will keep debugging the aircraft that do not yet work correctly, but this functionality is almost useful now. It can for example be used to make static aircraft out of old flyable aircraft, a task that is currently usually done using the great tool MDLtoBGL by Trevor de Stigter.
While working on reading the aircraft files I have also fixed some bugs in the code that checks the conditions of variables when reading the object. So also people converting scenery objects should see that this works better now.
From tomorrow the development release of ModelConverterX is able to handle objects with conditions better. When importing objects that have conditions applied you will get the form as shown below. In this form you can specify the value you want each of the variables to have. Using these values the conditions will then be evaluated and the object is imported with these conditions applied. So for example when reading an aircraft MDL you can use this is import it with the landing gear extended or retracted.
At the moment the form is still a bit technical, with all those numbers. But I am planning to replace the variables by a good description in a future version. The same applies to the (possible) values, if the variable only takes a certain number of values I want to add a dropdown box for them in a future versions.
If you do not want to specify the values of these variables while importing your object, there is a workaround as well. In the options you can specify how conditions are handled. By default they are set to UserSpecified, which means you get the form to give the values. But you can also specify that conditions are always seen as true or false. In that case you don’t have to specify any values.
Together with this change to handle object conditions, the development release will also support reading FS98 and FS2000 aircraft MDL files. Below are two screenshots from an aircraft that imports fine (once with gear and flaps extended and once with them retracted). Not all aircraft MDL files import as good as these however. This seems to be caused by some of the conditions in them, that prevent (parts of) the aircraft from importing. This will be improved in future versions as well, it will take a bit more experimentation to determine the meaning of the different variables used in aircraft MDL files.
The screenshot above shows some success with reading the older aircraft MDL files. In this case it is a CFS2 aircraft (they use the same MDL structure as FS98 and FS2000). This models comes out quite good. Unfortunately not all models load that well. Many of them only show partly or not at all after importing. This seems to be caused by the fact that aircraft MDL files have a lot more conditional display than the scenery objects that ModelConverterX normally reads.
So I will first have to think of a best way to handle these conditions, else it is not possible to read aircraft MDL files usefully. Luckily this was already on the wishlist for other objects as well. I would like to add the ability to switch variables on or off from within ModelConverterX and that you then see the object change. If that is not possible I will probably let the user set the value of all variables used before importing. But the first option would be more powerful of course.
So time to do some thinking and hopefully I can implement this feature soon….
Just a quick update on this ModelConverterX functionality. It is not finished yet, but I have made some progress last week. I can now read the information from the files, but when testing with some aircraft MDL files I still encounter a lot of BGL opcodes that ModelConverterX does not recognise yet. So I am working on adding those before I put this functionality in the development release. Last four days we were away camping in Luxembourg, so I hope to continue programming on it later this week.
This Monday I already blogged about the new feature for ModelConverterX that allows it to read the old section 9 BGL files. This is the kind of files that tools like FSSC, Airport for Windows or GroundMaker make. I have now finished this reader and it will be available in the development release from tomorrow.
Since Monday I have added support for many additional BGL opcodes, so that most of your BGL files should work fine now. I have used some scenery I made more than 5 years ago for FS2002 (or was it FS2000) to test this function and it seems to be working quite good. If you still find some unsupported opcode, please let me know using the FSDeveloper forum.
This new feature might come in handy if you want to port some scenery you made many years ago and of which you lost the sources and only have the BGL files left. With this feature done I hope to give reading FS98 and FS2000 aircraft a try this weekend….
