SceneryDesign.org
Today I was testing ModelConverterX with the default Airbus A321 of FSX. When I wanted to export the object to a different format I noticed that the default name suggested by ModelConverterX was a bit weird. This was because the name stored in the MDL file was not really correct, I hope they are not offended in Toulouse…
Last May I gave a presentation about ESP and FSX at the DevDays in Amsterdam. Until now I never found out what they did with the video recording of that session, but today I found it back on the MSDN website. It is in Dutch, so unfortunately not everybody will be able to understand what I am saying.
Your first question might be why I would like to do this? There are multiple reason for that, but the main reason is that I was not so pleased with processing my big aerial imagery on Vista. It just doesn’t seem to work nicely when you are processing files of a few GB in size. So I decided to do the processing of my imagery on my other machine that is running Linux.
After the processing was done I had the option to copy the resulting image file back to my Windows machine to make the BGL or I could try to do that on Linux as well. So that is when I tried to run the FSX SDK tools with Wine under Linux. I only tried the terrain tools until now, but it worked well. All I had to do was copy the resulting BGL onto my Windows machine to view it in FSX. But copying a BGL of a few hundred megabytes is still a lot quicker than copying a few gigabyte of imagery files.
At bit off topic maybe, but recently I found out that my company (the Dutch Aerospace Laboratory – NLR), put some nice promotion videos on YouTube. So if you might want to see a bit of the things I am doing for work have a look. Especially this video gives a nice overview of some of the simulation facilities I am working with.
Although the functionality to automatically generate lower polygon models for the LOD is not finished yet, I still have to add functionality to preserve materials and mappings better, I have decided to move over to another big thing on my ModelConverterX todo list. The main reason for this is that I need that other functionality more at the moment for some objects I want to convert.
What I am working on now is exporting of animations. In the preview it is already possible to show the animations of imported FSX MDL files, but it would be much more useful if they could also be exported from the tool. That would also open the possibility to convert the animations that might be contained in API macros that you are converting.
The bad news for me is that I found out the internal model I use to store the object in needs some modification to work more efficiently with animations. So at the moment I am working on that. After that I hope to add some new features again. With animation support in there as well, I have finished all of the main new features I planned for version 1.0 of ModelConverterX. Some features still need to polished a bit more, but I feel a new release to the general public is not very far away anymore.
Sometimes a small preview video says more than a long piece of text. So therefore I have a preview video of the ModelConverterX LOD Creator functionality for you. Enjoy!
The last few days I have been working hard on improving the ModelConverterX tool again. Some other members of the Netherlands 2000 Scenery Design team were busy trying to convert some of the old API macros in the project to new FSX MDL files, so they provided me with a fresh stream of bugs.
While testing one ship object I came to an interesting conclusions, illustrated by the screenshot below. In the screenshot you see the ship in ModelConverterX in the top left corner. On the right you see it twice in FSX. The ship at the back is the original API macro. It is obvious that FSX has trouble to display some of the features of this object. Apparantly this object uses some opcodes that are soo old that FSX no longer fully supports them. But the ship in the front is the same object, placed as a FSX MDL file after converting it with ModelConverterX. This looks a lot more like the ship it is supposed to be.
I found this a nice example to illustrate the benefit of converting your old objects to the FSX format. That is also the purpose I started making ModelConverterX for in the first place.
I have added some additional information to the FSDeveloper Wiki.
Some time ago I came across the website CG Textures which has a huge collection of images that can be very useful when looking for a specific texture. I think this might be a useful website for scenery designers.
Before we had a forum called Object market at the FSDeveloper site where people could share
their work with other developers. This forum has now closed and all
objects from it have been added to the downloads section.
Of course users are still free (or I would even say encouraged) to contribute their work to the download section. Here you can find all instructions on how to do so.