SceneryDesign.org Do you want to access the FSDeveloper forum on your smartphone as well? We have installed a plugin so that you can now use the Tapatalk application for the FSDeveloper forum as well. With the free version of this application you can read the forum and with the paid version you can also post new messages easily from your smartphone. Hopefully this is useful to some users.
Reading non library BGL files
ModelConverterX could already read FS2004 and FSX library BGL files, but using the recent improvements I made for the aircraft MDL reader, I have now added another function that was on my todo list for quite some time. I have added support for reading older section 9 SCASM BGL files. This includes the scenery BGL files made with the FS2002 GMax gamepack, but also the older BGL files made by tools like Airport for Windows, FSSC or GroundMaker. It should now be possible to read objects from such files as well. Not all of the files I tested until now work already, some of them still have many unknown BGL opcode, I will try to continue to add these in the next couple of days.
Aircraft liveries
Today I made some improvements to the aircraft MDL reader of ModelConverterX. It still can’t read all MDL files, but much more of them should work now. This should at least give you an idea of the geometry of these models.
The picture above shows an AI 737-300. Now that the geometry seems OK, the thing that bugged me most was the textures not showing. This is because for aircraft MDL files you can’t just take the main texture folder, they often have different folders for different liveries. So I decided to add support for that as well. At the top, next to the LOD selection, you can now also select which livery for the textures you want to load. Below are some examples of the same aircraft, but with a different livery.
The performance when switching liveries is not yet perfect, it sometimes
takes a few seconds for the preview to refresh. That is something I
hope to improve later on. The changes will be available in the development release of tomorrow.
Some ESP news
Let me just repeat some of the ESP related news that Tim Gregson (Beatle) recently posted on his blog.
ESP is now officially dead, MS has taken the ESP website offline. The SDK pages on the MSDN website are still there though. Tim also reported that he has left MS now and will be working as a consultant for Lockheed Martin on the Prepar3d program (which is what LM is doing with the ESP code they licensed). So good luck with the new job Tim and hopefully we will hear more about Prepar3d in the future.
Reading aircraft MDL files
This must have been one of the most often requested features for ModelConverterX. And I should directly say that it is not implemented completely yet, but this weekend I started on adding the functionality to read aircraft MDL files from FS2002 and FS2004. Below you can see a screenshot of the default fueltruck MDL that comes with FSX. But in fact it is in the FS2004 aircraft MDL format.
So as you can see this relatively simple object can be imported now, but I should be honest and say that most of the other models I try still fail. This usually happens because some BGL opcode is encountered that ModelConverterX is not aware of yet. So I think some more and better testing is needed before I can put this functionality in the development release.
While working on this feature, I also came across two BGL opcodes that seem to be unknown to the BGLC_9 compiler. These are C9 and CC. Their functionality seems very similar to the VertexList and DrawTriList commands, although some of the parameters are 32 bit, instead of 16 bit long. I do not fully understand yet what the differences are, but hopefully this will also start to make sense soon.
Improved LOD Creator functionality
Over the last days I worked on the ModelConverterX LOD Creator tool. My first aim was to add another algorithm to calculate the LODs. And besides that I also improved the user interface a bit.
On the right you see a screenshot of the new user interface and since the manual is not yet updated, I will give a brief overview of the changes here.
The selection box at the top right allows you to choose between the different algorithms that are available. At the moment you can choose either vertex clustering or quadratic based error. The last one is the algorithm that was used in the previous version of ModelConverterX and it has not changed in this new update. I hope to improve that algorithm more later on. Below the algorithm selection box you see the different parameters that you can set for each of them.
The remaining changes in the user interface are mainly the buttons on the bottom left. They allow you to remove a LOD, rename a LOD or add an empty LOD. New is the import LOD button which allows you to load another file and that object will then be used for the LOD number indicated next to the button. This should allow people to make for example LODs with SketchUp. By saving them all to different files, you can combine them in one MDL using this tool.
Then to the new algorithm. What vertex clustering basically does is collapse all vertices that are within the same cell of a 3D grid. The resulting vertex position depends on the weight of the original vertices. In the implementation into ModelConverterX you can give vertices a weight based on:
- The area of the polygons that the vertex is a part of. This means that vertices that are part of a big polygon will have more influence on the new shape. In the properties you can set the influence of the area at a value between 0 and 1. Where 0 means no additional weight and 1 means the maximum additional weight.
- The angle between the polygons that the vertex is a part of. The idea behind this weight is that polygons on the outside of the object are more likely to have sharp edges. By given them more weight the overall silhouette will be preserved better. This parameter also has a range between 0 and 1.
- Ground clamping. This gives an additional weight to vertices that are on or below the ground. This is to ensure that you building does not float in the lower LODs.
The two remaining parameters of the algorithm are grid size and floating cells. The first one is quite obvious and determines how big the cells are, within which the vertices are collapsed. The second allows you to choose between uniform fixed cells and floating cells. According to the literature the last option should give better results in general, although I have already seen that it does not apply to every object.
So I hope you enjoy these new LOD functionalities and if you want to see them in action have a look at this demonstration video.
scenery.org
Ever since I started making scenery for Flight Simulator, you could get almost any tool you wanted using scenery.org. That site provided a great overview of tools and tutorials for scenery designers. Sadly last week the site went offline.
This did not come as a huge surprise, since the owner Tom Gregor had already indicated before that running the site was becoming to expensive. After this message the FSDeveloper admins already contacted Tom Gregor to see if we assist in some way. We do have his permission to keep the tools and tutorials alive on FSDeveloper and we also have a backup of all the related files. But before we can put them online again, we need to get permissions from the authors of these tools and tutorials as well. So we are working on that now.
A big thanks to Tom Gregor for running this site for all those years. And we’ll do our best to keep as much of the knowledge it contained available.
Black textures
An often occurring problem when designing scenery is that your object shows with black (or no) textures. There can be many causes for this. For example a texture that is not a power of two in size, a texture that is in the 24 bit BMP format that FS can not read or just a texture that you forgot to copy to the right texture folder.
Recently I discovered another reason for black textures (and this one took me a little while to figure out). When you apply a bump map to a material, but the polygons that use the material do not have a normal set you will also get black textures. So this is another one to remember when such problems occur again.
Attached object orientation
For quite some time already ModelConverterX has the functionality to attach things to your object. For example an effect or another library object. I mainly used this to attach lights to objects and since these shine in any direction I never really bothered to check the orientation properly. Until there were some questions about this on the forum recently. So I took a look and found out the orientation was not really correct.
So in the latest development release of ModelConverterX this has been fixed. The orientation of attached objects is now exported correctly. I have also changed how attached objects are displayed in the preview. They not only show a dot now, but also a line that is the direction in which they are pointing. In the attached object editor you can change this orientation by entering a heading, pitch and roll for the attached object.
Oh and don’t ask me why there is a tree attached to that building. It just happened to be a nice library object to test with…
Normal maps for FSX
Today I was experimenting a bit with using normal maps and bump maps in gPoly. So this meant I had to make some bump maps and while doing so it bothered me again that you have to transform the output of the normalmap plugins to work correctly in FSX. Maybe it is my GIMP skills, but I never find it easy to swap channels and do tasks like that in GIMP.
So I decided to add a functionality to ModelConverterX that does all the work for you. You just load the output of the normalmap plugin and it will create the right image for use in FSX. You can find this functionality in the texture converter function of the development release. Below are some screenshots.
