Public transport

First, sorry for this rant, but at the moment I am just to annoyed by it.

Since a few moments the public transport company of Amsterdam already decided to make it more difficult for me to get to work. They are renovating some stations, including the one I have to depart from. To make that work easier they decided to cancel half of the metros (including the one I have to take of course), forcing me to change metros at another station.

That alone is something that I have to accept of course, but this week it seems they are really messing things up. There hasn’t been a day yet this week that the metros that are still running didn’t have an extra delay or one of them was cancelled as well. So I am getting used now to spend quite long every morning on the platform, hoping that a metro will arrive soon.

Would this be their revenge for the fact that I bought a car recently? Who knows, at least I am counting down the days that I still have to travel by metro to work every day. Soon I will be joining the traffic jam on the highway in the morning…

Texture file formats

Loading the textures files into the ModelConverterX tool is something that has given me quite some challenges already. I have used different libraries for it already and all of them gave me some trouble. At the moment I am using the library by Martin Wright and although this one can read all the files I want, it is not a very fast library. So this makes the loading of models relatively slow.

That is why I decided to have a look at how the different texture formats exactly work and see if I could create my own texture file loaders. At the moment I have been studying the BMP and DDS formats. Creating a loader for those formats was not so hard, so at the moment I can read these formats. This should allow loading most of the texture formats used by Flight Simulator.

Only the R8 format is still on my todo list, as this is still used by older API macros that the tool should be able to convert. Maybe it is a good idea then to convert the textures to the DDS format when exporting to FSX MDL files.

I still have to test my new loaders with some more models, to see if there are not some “exotic” variants in use that I can not yet read at the moment. But all together it has been quite interesting to study those formats and gave me a lot of useful background information on how they work.

ESP Developers Conference

I am a bit late, so you might already have read this somewhere else. Microsoft is organising an ESP Developers Conference in both Orlando and London. For more details check the ESP blog.

The one in London is at the 19th of November and I am tempted to go there myself as well. At the moment I am looking for affordable travelling options. So maybe I will see you there.

Getting up to speed

One of the problems with the latest release of ModelConverterX is that the preview image can be a bit slow when a big model is loaded. And with a bit slow I mean that it can take a second or so to update while you are rotating around. This is a bit annoying to say the least.

So solving this problem was quite high on my todo list and today I decided to take a look at it. The good news is that the preview works a lot faster now, I just had to optimize the OpenGL code used a bit more. I have now made use of draw lists and vertex arrays and that gave a big boost to the performance. Now even with the most complex default models I could find, rotating around and running the animations goes smooth. So the leason learned for today is that it is very easy to slow your graphics down by just sending unoptimized code to the graphics card. And in the next release you will also be able to enjoy this improvement.

Back from vacation, but…

I am back from vacation now for almost a week, but today I finally had the time to get up to date with all the posts on the FSDeveloper forum. This was partly because I had to go to Paris on bussiness trip two days this week and also because there were just to many things to catch up with. For example when I got back there were first some spammer problems on the forum that had to be addressed. Luckily it seems we solved that problem for the moment.

While on vacation I did some thinking about a new tool to make the creation of ground polygons easier. It seems that is still a big issue for many users. So I think I will create a tool that can do the ASM tweaks for you and also automatically split up your polygons in smaller pieces so that the curvation of the earth in FSX does not give trouble. I hope to start working on this tool soon. Another feature I have in mind is allowing to split big airports up into several reference points. This is good for the performance and should also reduce the deformation that sometimes appears when the polygons are too far away from the reference point.

And of course I am also still working on the ModelConverterX tool. I want to continue on the new features for version 1.0 soon as well. When I think about all the things I want to do, I almost need a new vacation right away…

Vacation

Just to let you all know that I will not be writing on this blog in the next three weeks. The simple reason for that is that I will be on vacation. So see you again in three weeks time.

Phil Taylor is leaving ACES

If you have not heard it already, Phil Taylor is leaving ACES, check out this post at Phil’s own blog.

I wish him luck and a lot of fun in his new job. And a big thanks for all the work he did for FS in the past. Especially the role he played in opening up the ACES team more to the public is something that should be much appreciated. It must have been hard sometimes for him to deal with the community, especially the part that are never satisfied with the product, but in the end it is great that we have more interaction with the team now. So once again a big thanks for your part in that Phil.

Down?

At the moment I can’t reach the FSDeveloper site, so it seems down. When I get back home this evening I will investigate further. Sorry for the inconvenience.

EDIT: The site is up again now.

Levels of detail

You might already have noticed that last weekend I released a new update for ModelConverterX. It contains just some small, but important bug fixes for the version 0.50 release.

So with those annoying bugs gone, I have started to concentrate on the next version again. The first feature I am working on is expanding the support for levels of detail. In the version 0.50 release I added support to read them from FSX MDL files and to display them in the preview. That is nice of course, but what is more important is being able to export them again. So on this version I want to add that functionality for the FSX MDL and OpenFlight writers.

Another feature I want to add is the automatic creation of the lower level LODs. I have been reading some papers on this subject and I think it should be possible to add such a function to ModelConverterX. I find especially the papers by Michael Garland quite interesting. I will start implementing that kind of logic soon and hopefully the results will be nice. I’ll keep you informated about that.

But besides the LODs there are more features on my todo list and from next week I will also be on vacation for 3 weeks. That means you should not expect another ModelConverterX release soon.

TeamSpeak

Since we moved with FSDeveloper to the new server we have also had a TeamSpeak server installed there. Sometimes it was running, most of the time it was down, but we never really used it. Until this weekend, finally Nick and I found the time to test the server and see if everything works fine. After a few minor changes we got evetything working, so now it is time to announce that we have this functionality.

Hopefully the users will find it a useful function, I personally think that sometimes a quick chat might be more efficient than dozens of forum posts. Also we are thinking about organizing some special events in the future that can use the TeamSpeak server as a way to communicate. We are thinking about discussion session for a certain topic or just a nice social chat. Or if you have other good suggestions, be sure to let us know.