gPoly status update #4

Time for another gPoly status update, today I have made some good progress on the tool again. The first part I have finished is the display of the GeoTIFF background image, this code seems to be quite optimal now, so that even with big images you can pan and zoom without too much delay. What I still have to do is verify the accuracy of the geo position, I think I need to render some reference information (of which I know the position) over it to do this. Another related feature on the todo list is the ability to make images georeferenced when they are not yet.

Today I also worked quite a bit on the user interface, especially the part that allows you to manipulate the layers in the project. Each layer can hold a background image or a set of features (polygons, lines, etc). Below is the screenshot of the current status.

gPoly status update #3

This evening I continued on the gPoly tool. The focus was again on the display of the background images, since they are a very important feature when drawing ground features or when checking if they are in the right location. I made some good progress and for small to medium sized airports it is working fine now.

But when I try to load the high resolution background image I have of Schiphol things go less smooth, especially when you zoom in far and the highest resolution needs to be loaded. So there is still some work to be done when selecting the resolution that should be displayed, but progress is being made. I should note that the background image of Schiphol is a GeoTIFF of almost 4 GB in size, so it should be expected that things will never be super smooth when working with such a big file.

Day or night?

Tonight I have added a nice little feature to ModelConverterX again (it will be in the 1.2 development release tomorrow). You might wonder what it is? You can now choose to render your object in day or night view. The night view allows you to preview the night textures. Here is a little screenshot of one of the default objects.

It is not yet finished, since I just display the night texture now. Whether it is a nightmap or a lightmap is not yet taken into consideration. So that gives some room for future improvement. But this will allow you to check how the object would look during the night.

ModelConverterX 1.1 available

Just a quick note that a new stable version of ModelConverterX is available. If you have been using the development release lately there is not so much changed, but compared to the last stable release there are loads of improvements. I have also updated the user manual.

For the coming time the development of ModelConverterX will be slowed down a bit, since I plan to focus more on the gPoly tool.

A sunday morning experiment

By default landclass is defined as grid data within FSX, so that means that for each area of roughly 1.2 x 1.2 kilometre you can define what kind of land usage it has. For some time already I wanted to test what effect landclass polygons would have on the looks of the terrain, so this morning I gave it a try.

I had some land usage data for the Netherlands available, which gives the type of land usage as vector polygons. So I wrote a quite translation tool to map those values on FSX landclass GUIDs. Below is a screenshot of the results in FSX. As you can see more detail becomes visible in the terrain, like smaller forest areas, dunes and beaches. Also towns and cities appear clearer at the location where they are in real world.

In the screenshot you can also see that the mapping is not always perfect yet (for example the dunes became sand as well), but for a quick sunday morning experiment I am quite happy with the results. If I could find some land usage data I could use freely (unfortunately that is not the case with the data I used in this test case), then this could be an interesting approach to make the terrain more recognisable without using huge aerial imagery.

Render modes

Today I have added some more options to ModelConverterX, this time different render modes for the preview. Before you could only render the object as it would show in FS, but now you also have the option to only show the faces (no textures) or to show a wireframe view of the object. I some cases these different render modes might help to figure out what is going on with your model.

As you might have noticed I am trying to fix some of the open issues with ModelConverterX, so that I can release another stable version. Apart from a few items the list for version 1.1 is empty now, so after that I will focus more on the gPoly tool.

A too powerful tool?

A tool like ModelConverterX is very powerful in converting objects between different formats. But the fact that it can read BGL or MDL files as well also means it becomes relatively easy to import the work of somebody else into GMax and modify it to your needs. This gives some tension, on one hand you want to create a flexible for the users who is converting the work he has made and allow him to enjoy his old work in FSX. On the other hand you don’t want to encourage people to steal the work of others, manipulate it a bit, and then distribute it as there own.

ModelConverterX already shows a user license when you first start it that reminds the user to only use it with objects that he owns the copyrights from and is thus allowed to convert. But let’s be honest, who is reading that kind of license before clicking on the agree button?

I do not want to limit the tool too much, since there is also a lot of legitimate usage of it. So I have decided to add a little reminder while you are exporting. If you are converting your own objects just wait till it disappears when the export is finished. If you are trying to steal somebody else’s work I hope it makes you feel guilty (at least a little bit)…

Lockheed Martin and ESP

I guess you must have heard this news already, but last week it was announced that Lockheed Martin has licensed Microsoft ESP. I was at the I/ITSEC exhibition at that time and in the Lockheed Martin booth they indeed had a solution build using ESP on display, a PC-12 trainer. It is very interesting to see that ESP is still living on in some way.

It should be stressed, this was discussed in some forums already, that this does not mean that the gaming version of FS is still living on. The license to Lockheed Martin excludes the entertainment segment. But it would be interesting to see if they plan to improve ESP and sell it on to other companies for professional use…