Tool in a mid-life crisis?

Some time ago I started a survey to understand better how ModelConverterX is used. Thanks to everybody who provided their feedback, I have now collected the answers and made an overview of them.

Luckily many of the answers are not too surprising, it seems in general the tool is being used as I had expected. And the features people are missing are those that I had on my wishlist already. And of course there are always some nice new ideas, so I will put those on my wishlist as well.

I would like to put some more focus on two of the results that surprised me most. First the COLLADA DAE format seems a lot more popular than Google Earth KMZ to import models from Sketchup. I find this a little surprising, since I had expected KMZ was more popular. I think the advantage of KMZ is that the textures are contained in it as well, so you never loose them. But it seems most Sketchup users use COLLADA DAE files instead.

Another thing that surprised me even more is that import SCASM files and API macros is not popular at all. Even the recently added functionality to import COLLADA files is more popular already. Since I started developing this tool to convert my old API macros over to the FSX MDL format, I was a little surprised to see that most people perform other conversions with the tool. I guess you could almost say that the tool has a sort of mid-life crisis and is transforming into other functionalities as well.

Once again, thanks everybody for your feedback, it is really interesting to get an overview of how you use the tool!

Exporting animations to FS2004

In the next development release of ModelConverterX you will find a first implementation of exporting animations to FS2004 scenery MDL files. This item was on the wishlist for quite some time already and I have now given implementing it a try.

I am sure you will find some bugs in this first implementation. Some of my test objects still go wrong, but the majority works fine already. So if you find any trouble or have an object that does not yet work correctly, please let me know.

FSX temporarily sold out

To be honest I don’t know how long this announcement is on the FSInsider website already, but it seems that MS has run out of copies of FSX. The good news is that they are making new copies, so FSX should be available again at the end of May.

Since it is very important for the health of the FS community that the flight simulation platform can still be bought, I think this is good news. For developers there are still enough challenges to make even nicer addons, so let’s hope this keeps our community as active as usual for some time to come.

Sometimes you have to break some things…

While working on the drawcall minimizer functionality of ModelConverterX recently, I realized that I had to update the way I represent the textures internally in the tool. Try to add minimizer support for night textures and other subtexture types turned out to be must harder than it should be.

So I have now changed this in the ModelConverterX design. But since textures are just an important part of an object, it turned out that I had to modify quite some code (or you could also say that I had broken quite a bit of code). So I am now taking the time to test if everything is still working as it should. In the short term this costs some effort, but I am sure that in the long run this redesign will make it easier for me to add new functions.

Once I have finished the testing, finishing the drawcall minimizer should be a lot easier. I’ll let you know when it is done…

CFG tweaks and performance

Recently tweaking the FSX.cfg file to get better performance and solve some display problems has been a hot topic in the FS community. And now it seems Lefteris has made a nice little tool to assist in this tweaking. So check out his blog post for more details about the tweaking and the tool.

FSDeveloper email problems

For a little while we are having email troubles at the FSDeveloper website. This means that the forum software is not sending out notifications of new posts. But more annoying is that also new users registrations also don’t get the confirmation email. We are working hard on solving these issues. If you have registered recently and are still waiting for the confirmation email, please contact me and I will active your account manually. We hope to have everything working as before again soon.

A nice surprise!

Yesterday I found a nice email in my inbox,I have received the Microsoft MVP award for another year. Last year, when the ACES studio had just been closed down for a couple of months, I was a little bit surprised already to still get the award. But to be honest, this year I was not expecting it at all.

It is nice to see that MS is still appreciating the Flight Simulator community efforts. And of course the FS community is still going strong, there are many people still making their addons for FS2004 and FSX. Actually you can see the community is still learning how to get the most out of these platforms.

FSDeveloper will continue to serve this community of developers and I am happy to do so as a MVP again (of course we would also continue without the award).

Where did March go?

I made my last blog post at the beginning of March and now it seems the month is almost over already. Where did all that time go? I guess it is partly because it has been quite a busy month at work and I also spend some time on finally finishing our wedding photo album.

But there is also some progress on FS related issues. I have slowly been working on ModelConverterX, mainly looking at the drawcall minimizer. And it seems just the other day some issue appeared concerning the materials in the FSX MDL format. I am looking into that at this moment.

Besides that I am also working a bit on the NL2000 project, trying to hunt down some bugs that hurt the performance a bit. We want to make the performance of version 4 as good as we can of course.

Drawcall minimizer video

I have made a little demonstration video that shows how you can use the drawcall minimzer. In this video I will be converting a KMZ file to a MDL file. In that process I am using the mass texture editor and the drawcall minimizer to make sure the textures end up as efficient as possible. In this case I could reduce the amount of drawcalls from 45 to 6. Enjoy the video and if you still have questions about the functionality please ask them on the forum (in the absense of a manual).

ModelConverterX usage survey

To get a better understanding of how you are using the ModelConverterX tool I have setup a survey. So if you are using ModelConverterX, I would appreciate it if you spend some time to answer those questions. Knowing which functionality, importers and exporters matter most to you, helps me to make the tool even more useful in the future.

For example I have some ideas to change the GUI so that information is presented more clear. But to know if this would really help, I would like to have a better understand if you are normally running ModelConverterX full screen or not.

So thanks already for taking some time to fill in this survey. The survey is on the same server as the ModelConverterX development release and might take a few seconds to load.