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.

Drawcall minimizer

Today I have been working on the drawcall minimizer and it is going quite well. For the diffuse textures I can now reduce the amount of textures by combining them onto one texture sheet, after which the texture mapping is updated automatically on the model. The biggest problem with this approach is that other textures (like night textures) are not updated yet at the moment. And also I would like to add the functionality to put the colours into the texture sheet as well to minimize the amount of drawcalls further.

But if I can’t fix those issues quickly, I will release the current functionality soon so that you can also use it. While working on it, I have also speeded up the loading of texture files  a bit, this should be mainly noticeable in the material editor.

Jetlag almost gone

We are back home for a few days now, after enjoying a two week vacation in California. We had a lot of fun there and now that the jetlag is almost gone, it is time to spend some time on my FS tools again.

Initially I plan to focus on ModelConverterX a bit more. I want to finish the function to minimize drawcalls and will try to fix some bugs in the COLLADA reader. Since my posts about using Sketchup it seems many people give it a try, and they find many new bugs as well.

After that I want to focus more on gPoly again. I got some great new ideas for this tool and I am looking forword to continue coding on it. My first focus will be on the functionality to actually export the polygons you draw to FS, since without that the tool does not have that much usage.

San Francisco here we come!

Just a quite note, at the moment we are packing our bags and tomorrow we are flying to San Francisco for a two week vacation. So that means no computer, no FSDeveloper, no email and no tool updates. I am looking forward to this break and hope to come back with many new ideas for tools like ModelConverterX and gPoly as well. So see you all in two weeks again.

Minimize drawcall functionality

One of the challenges when converting old API macros or COLLADA objects is often how to make them  framerate friendly. It is not uncommon for such objects to use many small texture files. If you for example load an object from the Google 3D warehouse, don’t be surprised to find it uses 40 different texture files.

For some time it was on my ModelConverterX wishlist already to add some functionality that will merge all these textures into one texture sheet and automatically adjust the mapping on your object as well. Today I started coding on this.

I am certainly not finished yet, but the first results are very encouraging already. The image on the right shows my test application, where I loaded a bunch of textures from a KMZ file. All these pieces have been combined into one big texture sheet.

What I still have to do is make the code to update the texture mapping on the object. And of course to make a user interface to access this drawcall minimizer functionality. But that should not be the hardest part.

So hopefully later this weekend I can have the first beta version ready. But now I am first going to enjoy the snow outside and have a walk.