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.

Moving status #4

Since a few days FSDeveloper is running on the new server now and this are going well. The new server seems to be faster than the old one for most users. Today we have made two additional changes:

  • We have updated the style used. On the forum I explain the reasons behind this change.
  • The download section has a new user interface, it is less fancy but probably more user friendly. Once again the details are on the forum.

With this the moving of the FSDeveloper website is almost down, the only item still on our list is to improve the frontpage a bit, as we currently have a simple static one (which is still in the old theme). We have some nice plans for that already, but I’ll keep that a surprise for now…

Moving status #3

We have pointed the DNS to the new server now, so FSDeveloper should become accessible for you soon again. This might take a little while though.

We are still tuning and tweaking the last details, but the community could be reopened already. So we would like to welcome you back in our new home.

Moving status #2

The moving of FSDeveloper is going well. We have got everything running again and are currently in the process of some final testing and tuning. So hopefully we can get the site live again in a hour or two.