Converting SCASM animations

This week I made some good progress on ModelConverterX again. The ability to convert animations from SCASM macros was on my wishlist for a long time already and I have now taken the first steps. Animations that are defined with a SCASM TransformCall command are supported. For these animations you specify for each axis which timer should drive the rotation around it.

Other types of SCASM animations are not yet supported, but I will try to add them as well once I come across good samples to do so. So after this version is release, please report any problem you encounter. Speaking about a new release, with the animations implemented, the next release is getting near. I still plan to make the LOD Creator functionality a bit more user friendly and then the next release can be done.

Is this the end?

The recent developments of Microsoft shutting down the ACES studio are making me a bit sad. Let me try to explain why.

When FSX was released it included some great improvements over FS2004. I am talking from a scenery designer perspective of course, so I was most happy about the improved terrain engine, that allows more resultion that 4.8 meter on the photo scenery, a better autogen system and the improvements to the modelling SDK, which means that more things can be done without tweaking the code. In my job I am also working with visual simulations and I can assure you that most of these systems can simulate the entire world with the ease that FSX can, so from that point of view it is a great product.

But from a developer point of view FSX is also a big step backwards. Personally I think developing for FS2002 and FS2004 was most fun. In these two versions you could really build anything you imagined. The scenery design techniques were very flexible. Want to make a completely working docking system, of course you can. Want to make an animation of a hangar door that is trigger by the approaching aircraft, of course you can. I have great memories of how we were searching for those limits in the community.

But in FSX that is all no longer. The scenery format is so restricted that I don’t even have to think about a conditional scenery object, triggered hangar door animations or seasonal textures on my object. And then I am not even considering a completely working docking system, which is much more complex. The progress on the points I mentioned above have removed all the flexiblity to make interesting and nice things for the developer.

All this time I was hoping that this step backwards with FSX, would be the price we had to pay to make three steps forward again in the next version. I believed that if we would use the product we might find some work arounds and in the same time we could make sure ACES knew about the flexibility we wanted, so that the next version would be better again.

Now ACES is closed, the development of a next version will at least take longer. And personally I am not sure if I can keep motivated to develop for FSX given all the restrictions it puts on the developer. I have always enjoyed most to find the edge of the product, make realistic and complex objects, like working docking systems. FS2004 was great for that and FSX makes that almost impossible. Maybe it is time to move back to the FS2004 techniques and start making those interesting and challenging objects again? I guess the future will tell…

Microsoft closes ACES studio

Yesterday while driving home I heard on the news that Microsoft would be cutting jobs. But at that time the thought never came into my mind that the consequences of that would be as big as we learned today. While looking at some simulation related news at work today, I suddenly came across the message that the Microsoft job reduction would have big influences on the ACES studio, which makes Flight Simulator, as welll.

After looking around the web for more information, things became more clear. Former ACES team members posted more information, like Steve Lacey on his blog or Phil Taylor on the AvSim forum. All the current information seems to indicate that all development on FSX, Train Simulator 2 and ESP have been stopped at this moment. I guess the coming days will make things more clear how things will evolve.

But how this affects the people that worked at the ACES studio is of prime importance at the moment of course. I hope they are all well and will find other employement soon. All I know is that they made a very clever simulation product, that is capable to simulate the entire world in great detail. Something they can be proud of.

Airbus 737-800?

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…

DevDays video

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.

FSX SDK on Linux

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.

NLR at YouTube

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.

Export of animations

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.