gPoly status update #2

Just a little update again with the progress of this morning. Using GDAL I got the geo-referenced background image loaded into gPoly. Until now it works quite good, but I think I will have to optimize the code a bit more to work better with bigger background images. Also I will have to add some functionality to make the image geo-referenced if it is not so already, not everybody has access to GeoTIFF files I guess. So there is still enough to do…

gPoly status update #1

OK, this is dangerous. I have made this mistake before, posting about a tool that is not yet finished at all. So let me start with a little disclaimer: although I have started coding on the new gPoly tool and although I am writing about it on my blog now, I am not sure when a first version will be available.  With these blog posts I will try to keep you informed about the progress. So let’s start with the first status update.

After much thinking and filling many pieces of paper with thoughts, I have started coding this week. At the moment I am working on the basic user interface, a first screenshot is below.

Once I have the interface in place to display the ground polygons (and
lines) I can start with other functionalities like importing from MDL
files, exporting to BGL file or drawing new polygons. The current plan is that the tool can both be used to create ground sceneries from scratch or to tweak objects made with GMax without needing to have the FS2002 gamepack. With ground sceneries I mean elements like ground polygons, extruded lines and other ground features like dirt, skit marks, etc.

But the first item on my list is to allow the display of a background image, since such a reference is quite important when making ground scenery. So hopefully I can get that working tomorrow.

Google Building Maker

Today I stumbled upon this new tool by Google: Building Maker. It is quite impressive to see how with a few mouse clicks you can make a 3D model using images showing the object from different angles. I guess this way of constructing would be the dream of many FS developers as well.

I did try the tool for a simple office building and that worked quite good, but I am not sure how easy it is with irregular shapes. I guess it is mainly suitable for objects that don’t need too much detail and mainly rely on their photo textures.

I also noticed that the latest Google Sketchup has a function to use Google Streetview images on the object directly. Although it might be easy, this new feature and the Building Maker tool make me wonder about the copyrights of the images used. We are not allowed to take images from Google Earth and use them in FS, but these kind of object depend a lot on such images. So would a designer who made an object like that be allowed to use it outside Google Earth?

KMZ reader

As a little bonus feature on top of the COLLADA reader I added yesterday, I have now also added a KMZ reader. KMZ is the file format used by Google Earth for its objects and basically it is a ZIP file containing the COLLADA file for the object and all the texture used all in one.

Below is a little screenshot of this reader in action. I took this cottage object from the Google Sketchup Warehouse to test if the reader is working fine and as you can see it is.

COLLADA reader available

The COLLADA reader for ModelConverterX, that I talked about in the previous post, will be available in the development release from tomorrow. The reader can read the geometries and materials used by the objects. At the moment transformations and animations are not yet supported. Below is another screenshot of the duck test object, now with the texture applied correctly.

I have tested it with some of the COLLADA sample objects and with some Sketchup output and the reader seems quite robust. But since this is just the first version of the COLLADA reader I would not be surprised if some user would find DAE file that can crash the tool. If you do find such issues please let me know.

 

COLLADA reader

Last I week I gave Google Sketchup another try and it seems a program you can learn to use quite quickly. If you compare it with GMax I think it has a learning curve that is much less steep. And I think if you model carefully in Sketchup you can make models with it that are suitable for real time rendering. So I think that for some people who just want to make some simple objects Sketchup might be a nice alternative.

But how to get those objects into FS? The free version of Sketchup only exports KMZ and DAE files. You could probably convert them to 3DS, import into GMax and then export, but I think all those extra steps make things too complicated. So I decided to work on a ModelConverterX feature that has been on my list for a while already, support for COLLADA DAE files.

I am not there yet, but I can now read the basic geometry from COLLADA files into ModelConverterX, below you see a screenshot where I loaded the COLLADA test duck. I still need to work on reading the materials used correctly and I guess some testing to see how robust the code is would be nice as well. But with a bit of luck I will have a beta of the COLLADA reader in the development release soon.

FSWeekend 2009

Time for a little update. This weekend was the annual FSWeekend in the Netherlands again, and I was present there on behalf of NL2000 and FSDeveloper. For NL2000 this was certainly not the first time we were there and it was a lot of fun to meet all those users of our scenery again. There are people you see almost every year at the weekend. For FSDeveloper it was the first time we were (a bit) visible at the event. Due to the more technical nature of the FSDeveloper community there was maybe a little less interest, but hopefully it helped some people to get starting in making some addons themselves.

Another interesting thing at the FSWeekend was that IVAO had organised a seminar about the future of Flight Simulation. At those sessions a panel discussed the consequences of the closure of ACES and what it meant for our hobby. The panel of 5 consisted of Jonckers (IVAO), Kenny Moens (IVAO), Mathijs Kok/Winfried Diekmann (Aerosoft), Francois Dumas (FSAddon and more) and me (NL2000/FSDeveloper). I guess this topic could deserve its own blog post later on, but in short the participants agreed that for the short term the consequences were mainly more stability and more time to develop nice addons. For the longer term the opinion varied more, but it is logical that you look differently at it when you try to make a living on FS addons. The fact that Aerosoft is considering to build their own simulator was also discussed of course and that sounds interesting indeed. I guess we’ll see what the future brings, but the FSWeekend also showed that there are still many people enjoy flight simulation as a hobby.

So with the FSWeekend over now, it is time to move on to some other things again. Besides the busy work schedule and the normal family activities, I will try to focus on two things in the coming weeks. The first one is to finish the typical Dutch windmill objects for the NL2000 scenery. Since we got asked many times at the FSWeekend when the next release will be, it guess I should try to give this some priority. Because we can’t release a Dutch scenery without such objects, we should keep up the myth that we all live in windmills and wear clogs. Oh and to come back to the question about the NL2000 v4 release (which I answered a dozen times this weekend), it will be released when it is ready and we can’t promise a date yet. But we can see the end of the beta testing tunnel by now.

The other activity I want to put some focus on is the new gPoly tool I am planning. The idea has crystallized quite clear in my head by now, so I am looking forward to start the actual coding. I really think that a tool to make the creation of custom ground polygons a lot easier would be helpful to many developers. So hopefully I can report some progress on this soon.

FSDeveloper is down – update

At this moment the FSDeveloper server is running again,but not stable yet. So we keep the forum deactivated till at least tomorrow. Here is a little background on what happened.

At this moment we do not know exactly why the server failed, but we are suspecting a hardware issue might be part of it. That is also why we keep the forums offline until we are sure the server is working fine.

Since the last few days we did get some errors that the daily backups
could not be completed. We were still looking into the source of this
problem, but it might be related to what brought the entire site down in the
end. The fact that the last backups had failed, also mean that we can
not restore the most recent data. So probably all forum posts and wiki edits made after the 20th of October are lost.

We are just as annoyed by all of this, as you will be. We hope that by tomorrow we have more information about the health of the server, so that we can bring FSDeveloper back online as soon as possible.