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.

MVP for another year

Today I got the message that I have received the MVP award again, so I will be MVP for another year. Of course it is a nice reward for the community work done in the previous year, but still it feels a bit weird since the ACES team has been dissolved. So I guess for the next year I’ll be a MVP without a product team to interact with.

FSX material settings

Over the last days I have been working on extending the material settings supported by ModelConverterX. I have now come to the point that all of the specific settings that you can make with a FlightSimX material can be edited with ModelConverterX as welll. If you download the latest development build you can try it out.

Adding this function has two main benefits. First it is possible to make more accurate settings for the material when converting API macros. For example the options for constant lighting or no shadows can be enabled now. The second benefit is that the material settings can be studied when importing an already existing MDL file. In many cases this can give a good insight in which combination of settings works best.

There is one thing that I did not finish yet. I am still working on adding good descriptions of the settings, based on those given in the SDK. These descriptions show in the Material Editor when clicking on a certain property. As tomorrow I will be leaving for a short vacation to Portugal, this will not be finished this week.

QGIS

Until now I was mainly using fGIS when I wanted to view or edit shapefiles, but since a year or two the updates to fGIS are no longer publicly available due to some license issue. Last week I bought an interesting book about opensource GIS and it brought the QGIS application to my attention again. I had tried an earlier build of this application some time ago, but then I found it more difficult to use than fGIS. Now I tried a more recent build and I am impressed, it is a really powerfull application and quite easy to use. So I will replace fGIS by QGIS as my default GIS application for viewing and editing vector data.

Animations with more than 1024 frames

It is about three years ago that I figured out how to make animations with more than 1024 frames for FS2004. But until now the only explanation other developers had on how this works was this quick forum post I made. I admit it is a bit late, but I have finally finished the tutorial that explains the process in a more detail. I also try to explain how the animations work, hopefully it makes sense. A bit thanks to all the forum users who kept asking questions about this, that is what made sure I finished the tutorial by now.