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.

Wavefront OBJ

One of the new features I have started working on since the release of ModelConverterX 1.0 is adding support for the Wavefront OBJ format. One of the reasons for this is that we use it at work for some files and I would like to try the LOD Creator functionality on those. But I think it could also be an alternative to the 3DS format for some people who try to import their old work into other tools. The 3DS format has some annoying limitations, like texture names having the 8.3 DOS naming convention. At the moment it seems to me that the OBJ format has less of such limitations.

In the current development build of ModelConverterX the OBJ reader is already implemented and until now it seems to work well on all test objects I have found until now. At the moment I am programming the OBJ writer, so this should be available for testing soon as well.

At first the writer will only support the object geometry, I will have to see if I can implement advanced features like animations or attachpoints. I will do some more study on the format for that later.

FSDeveloper not reachable

At the moment the FSDeveloper site seems not reachable. I have asked the webhost to look at this problem, so hopefully the site is up again soon.

EDIT: By now the problem is solved and the site is up and running again. Sorry for the inconvenience.

We almost got a release candidate

I almost finished the release candidate for ModelConverterX 1.0. I have decided to stop trying to make the LOD Creator more complex (and hopefully better) for the moment. There are some mathematical challanges in that, which I will take on again later. But compared to version 0.55 so many things have been improved already now that a new release is deserved.

So at the moment I am doing some final checks with my collection of test objects to see if no new bugs have slipped in. After that I will start updating the user manual. I hope to finish those two activities in a day or two, so by then the new release should be there.

Time for an update

It has been a while since I wrote on this blog, other things kept me a bit too busy lately. So it is time for an update!

I am still working on the next release of ModelConverterX. I had hoped to have the version 1.0 release ready by now, but the last few bits seem to take slightly longer than planned. The only main feature I am still working on is the LOD Creator one. I want to add functionality that considers the texture mapping of the object as well. This however means I have to update my matrix inverse code and that is what I am working on now (I’ll save you the math details).

After the version 1.0 release I am planning to close down the beta testing group that is around now and make the latest development build available to everyone. So that users have the option to download the latest stable release (that is stable) or the latest development release which has all recent features (and maybe some bugs). But first I need to focus on finishing the current version for release.