SceneryDesign.org Tomorrow I am going to Brussels for my work, as we are attending the ITEC there. This means that during the next days I won’t be behind my computer. Over the weekend I have been working a bit on the FS2004 MDL reader for ModelConverterX, but I am afraid it is still a bit buggy. I had hoped to iron out more bugs by now. Some of the default FS2004 library BGL files will still crash the tool. This is mainly related to reading the transformation and animations from the files. Once I am back I will continue working on this aspect, I feel I am almost there to implement it correctly.
Video tutorials
On FSDeveloper we have some video tutorials available for quite some time already, but most of the time they are hidden somewhere in the forums or Wiki. We have changed that now, by embedding a video player in the Wiki. This allows you to view the video tutorial directly inside the Wiki article. Have a look at the different tutorials that are available.
Currently there are not so many availble, but I hope that more video tutorials will be contribute in the future. They can be a very nice way to learn. You might also have noticed that I have put a new video tutorial for ModelConverterX online. It gives an overview of the basics of the tool.
International Flight Simulation Consortium
You might have read about the International Flight Simulation Consortium on the internet already, for example at Avsim or Francois Dumas’ blog. I don’t so much to add to what has been said there already, except that I was also present at the meeting and that FSDeveloper is thereby involved in the initiative. Once there is more news to report I’ll certainly do so.
Using my own tool
In the last week I did not do so much development on the ModelConverterX tool. The main reason for that was that I was actually using the tool myself. In the NL2000 project we have a collection of hundreds API macros that are positioned through the entire country of the Netherlands. It would be a lot of work to replace all of these objects, which we have build in the 10 years that the team exists, with new GMax made objects in the FSX MDL format. So therefore I have used the ModelConverterX tool to convert them all.
While working on that last week I found (and fixed) a few small bugs in the tool. And I also got some ideas for new features. For example a way to find missing textures or maybe only report the textures used by a library would be useful already. So I’ll put these on the wishlist for the tool.
I have now started working on some other of the features on the wishlist. Improving the FS2004 MDL reader and adding support to read attachpoints from MDL files are now highest on my list.
NL2000 GMax course
On July 4th 2009 the Netherlands 2000 Scenery Design Team will be organising a one day GMax course. The aim of this course is to let new developers who might be interested in designing their own scenery as a part of the NL2000 team try for a day, with the guidance of the current team members. There is no obligation to join afterwards, although we would be happy with some extra members to build more objects. So if you are interested, have a look at the NL2000 website for more details. Oh and maybe it is good to mention that the course will be in Dutch, as we are a Dutch scenery team.
Oops a bug
In the most recent development build of ModelConverterX a nasty bug has been fixed, so if you have downloaded it a few days ago, please update again. There was a bug in the FSX materials, which I updated about a week ago. Due to this bug all your objects will appear black in FSX. With the most recent version things show up with the correct colours and textures again.
FSDeveloper downtime
In the last few weeks the FSDeveloper has been down twice for a few hours. This is not something that should happen so frequently, so we are going to investigate where the problem is. During this process I also plan to do an upgrade of the forum software. I will make an announcement when I know when these activities will be performed, as they will result in a little downtime as well.
Back home from Canada again
This morning I came home from my bussiness trip to Canada, so currently I still have a small jetlag. But that is not the reason of this blog post, I have made available all the changes I made to ModelConverterX in a new development build now. This new build includes the features I blog about before. The main changes are:
- Added beginning of a FS2004 scenery MDL reader. Currently only the geometry and materials will be read correctly, but I am working on transformations and more advanced features already.
- The improved material editor GUI.
- Fixed problems with reading 32 bit textures.
- Improved the rendering of models with transparent textures, there should be less (hopefully no) drawing order issues now.
Especially for the FS2004 reader I am curious to hear how it is working with your FS2004 MDL files. So let me know if there are issues or suggestions.
Importing a FS2004 scenery MDL
I have started on another ModelConverterX feature that has been on my wishlist for a long time already now. This feature is the ability to import FS2004 MDL objects as well. At the moment only FSX MDL files can be imported. In the last day I have made the basics of the FS2004 MDL reader and the good news is that I can read simple MDL files with only geometry and textures fine now. I still need to test the code with more complex objects, but I am sure that those are not working yet.
Once this feature is fully working I would open the possibility to export FS2004 MDL files to FSX MDL files and other formats like OpenFlight and 3DS. I think this will be useful. One thing I should note is that currently I am working on the FS2004 scenery MDL files. In FS2004 aircraft MDL files have a different structure, so these will not work directly. But I think it should be relatively easy to adjust the reader afterwards so that it also supports these. But that is something for later, let me first get the scenery import working correctly.
A new Material Editor GUI
Before I already wrote that I was working on adding more of the FSX specific options to the ModelConverterX materials. This is almost done, only adding good descriptions for in the Material Editor description area is not completely done. But while working on this, I decided that the whole Material Editor GUI could use a small update. Below you see the new interface:
The biggest is that the panel can be resized more easily. For example you can now decide yourself how big you want the left or right column of it. So if you many want to look at the preview picture you can make that bigger. I have also added an option that allows you to preview the alpha channel of the texture.
Currently I am still in Canada for work, but once I am back next week I will commit these changes and then they will appear soon in the development release.