How do YOU like to work?

As I posted before, I am planning for a new ground polygon tool. To get more clear how potential end users, yes that is YOU, would prefer to make ground polygons I have setup a poll at the FSDeveloper forum. So please let me know what your ideal way to add ground polygons to a scenery would be. That will help me in creating a tool that is easy to use. I hope to see your vote!

Unions

You could say that recently unions have played a role in my life. First there has been my wedding one and a half week ago of course, forming a nice union between me and my wife. But that is not what I want to talk about in this blog post.

I have also been working on some code that allows me to do boolean operations between polygons. This functionality is something that will come in handy when I start working on my new ground polygon tool, It can for example be used to automatically slice the polygons into piece of no more than 100 meters, so that there are no problems with the curvation of the earth within FSX.

Below you see a screenshot of my test application, where I am testing out these boolean functions. The red polygon is polygon A and the green one is polygon B. The four small pictures below show in grey the union of A and B, the intersection of A and B, polygon A minus B and polygon B minus A respectively.

At first I looked around for some library that implements this functionality and although some exist, I still decided to code it myself in the end. The main reason for that was that I wanted to understand how the process works and that why learn a bit more from it (although it might not always be the easiest way). So in the end I used the algorithms described in Geometric tools for computer graphics and make my own implementation, building further onto for example the polygon class I had already made for ModelConverterX.

The boolean operations are not completely bug free yet, I have already found a few polygons that are not processed correctly. So there is still some more work to do and after that I will start with creating the tool for ground polygons that can make use of this logic. So I still have much more fun ahead…

Looking for input on a new ground polygon tool

For a while I am thinking about a new tool that will help in the creation of ground polygons, for the moment this tool will have the working name of gPoly. I have now setup a forum at FSDeveloper to discuss the requirements for such a tool. So I would like to invite other developers to provide their inputs and thereby help in shaping this new tool. I for example would love to hear what you see as the biggest issues currently while making ground polygons for your scenery and how you would like a tool to ease the process for you. So let me know what you think…

Announcing a new "project"

During the last weeks I did not write much on this blog. This was partly because of some travelling and also because of a new “project” I have been busy with. This project is not so compatible with FSX, or any other version of Flight Simulator. And where previous projects did not have a very clear end date, this one has. The name of this special project is Wedding 2009.

So until September of this year I will have less time to work on the different FS tools that are still in development. And it could be that I check the FSDeveloper website slightly less frequent as well. At least know you know why…

Up, down, up, down, up…

Today and yesterday the FSDeveloper website had a little bit of downtime. We are working on solving these issues by optimizing the server. Besides that we have also been working on the backups and some other technical issues. Hopefully so much downtime won’t happen again soon, but at least you can be sure we are onto it.

Object report

I have added another new feature to ModelConverterX that was on my wishlist for a while already, this is the feature to generate a HTML report of the objects loaded. This can be good for reference or to know which files are used and should be included in your distribution. For more details see this forum post.

I am considering to generate such reports for all the default object libraries in FSX as well, that would be a good reference of the objects that are available. These could then be hosted on FSDeveloper.

Managed SimConnect Client SDK

Tim Gregson (or Beatle) has released a beta version of a new managed SimConnect client SDK a few days ago, check out his blog for all the details. He has also posted some details about the usage in another post already. For those that are using SimConnect a lot in their applications I think this is an interesting development to follow. And a big thanks to Tim for releasing this work of course.

Attachpoints

Today I have been working a bit more on ModelConverterX. More specific on reading attachpoints for FS2004 scenery MDL files (for FSX files it was working already). While doing so I also took at a look at attached library objects, since their code is relatively similar I was able to add support for that type of attachpoint as well. So now the FS2004 and FSX MDL readers can both read attached effects and library objects. I have also updated the Wiki pages describing the MDL format with the new information I learned.

In the remainder of this week I plan to work on some other open issues for ModelConverterX, including the FSDS FSC format importer and exporter.