ModelConverterX – night textures

Two weeks ago I was able to produce a lot of updates for ModelConverterX quickly, since then it has been a little more silent. But that does not mean no progress is being made fortunately. Today I have been able to add some new features again.

The most important new feature is that night textures are now read in correctly from the SCASM macros and also applied correctly to the FSX MDL file. So your objects will no longer be dark at night. Another improvement deals with the default scale that might be set in the macro. That scale value is now read and applied by default. So most objects should appear fine when applied with a scale of 1 in your XML placement file.

Before I release a new test version there are some other bugs I want to solve though. Currently I am working on a transoformation bug, basically not all rotations and translation are applied correctly now (most simple objects are not affected by this bug). Another feature I would really like to add is the ability to specify which textures are transparant, so that they appear correctly in FSX. Hopefully I can finish these items somewhere during the week, so that I release a new version.

SimConnect and CIGI

For some while already I wanted to learn a bit more about SimConnect and this week I found a good reason to do so. I wanted to try if I could connect FSX to CIGI. CIGI stands for Common Image Generator Interface and this is a common way in professional simulations to talk between the simulation host and the image generators. At work we also make use of CIGI for this.

What I wanted to do is try to use FSX as an image generator with our simulation host, so for that I needed to connect FSX to CIGI. This is where SimConnect was very useful, after some hours of trying I am now able to control the user aircraft with the CIGI interface and I can also add other traffic (AI) and control them from CIGI as well. This is a nice demonstration that the concept works.

Until now I only tested it with the host emulator that CIGI delivers, so a next step will be to attach it to the real simulation at work. Should be interesting. Of course I am not ready yet, as other things like the weather should still be connected as well.

I guess such a CIGI connection might also be very useful for ESP, it would open a lot more possibilities in the professional flight simulation world.  Sounds like great fun to play with that some more at a later time…

Blender

What will happen when GMax is no longer there is a favorite topic for discussion on forums for a while already now. One of the alternative modelling programs often mentioned is Blender. Personally I consider that a good alternative as it is open source and seems to have quite a big user base. A little while ago I bought a book about this tool and I am reading that now. When I have read enough I will start making some models in it to see how it works. The interface seems a bit hard to learn (but we heard to same about GMax, right?), but from the book it sounds quite easy to work with once you know how it works.

And some interesting news is that a first version of a FSX exporter for Blender has now appeared. I find this a very interesting development and look forward to contribute to this exporter once I have learned my way around in Blender. I’ll keep you posted about my progress.

Which version?

 Which version? That is a question often asked on the [FSDeveloper] forums. And usually it is not the the original question, but the first reply because the thread starter did not mention is he is working with FSX or FS98. As we all know the answer might be different based on the FS version used. So to make things easier you now have to specify your FS version when you start a thread. That way other people will now it right away and can provide you with the correct answer. Read more about this change here.

Are they listening?

Complaining about the SDKs has been a favourite thing to do among developers for years. With previous versions of FS we always had to wait for ages to get them and of course it never told us what we wanted to know for our project (how could MS forget to include what I needed to know). I am sure you can all remember those good old time.

But that is enough sarcasm for now. With FSX things have improved a lot already, the SDK shipped with the initial release and I think I can say that the quality and usefulness of the documentation has also improved a lot. And things don’t stop there, no it gets even better.

The ACES team wants to know your feedback about the FSX SDK. For that purpose we have created a special subforum at the FSDeveloper site. You can use this forum to tell the ACES team about features you would like to see, about bugs in their current tools (not bugs in your files, really bugs in the tools) or about paint points, thing that are possible with the tool but just hard to do or inconvenient.

 These forums were made on request of some developers of the ACES team, so you can be sure that they will be looking at your suggestions. Of course nobody can promise that they will also implement them all in future SDKs.

Good old scanner

This week I have been cleaning my computer room a bit and I came across my old flatbed scanner. You know, such a thing that was used before we had digital cameras to get a photo onto the computer as a digital file. I think I bought this one about 10 years ago, when I had loads of photos I wanted to scan so I could use them for my scenery design activities. A few years later I got my first digital camera and from that moment on the scanner has mainly been collecting dust.

Now when cleaning the room I came across it again. And as I have not used it for years, I think I will do it away this time, it is just taking up space. But just finding this old piece of hardware reminded me of all the changes in scenery design in those 10 years. Now with digital photography it is some much easier to make good looking textures and photoreal objects. You start wondering how we will make scenery in 10 years from now…

ModelConverterX alpha 04

This evening I have uploaded a new alpha version of the ModelConverterX tool. It contains all the new stuff I have already blogged about in the last week or two. So if you are interesting in converting some of your old API macros to a FSX MDL file (or maybe an OpenFlight file), give this latest version a try. And let me know if you have any problems or suggestions, so that I can further improve the tool.

Scale it!

Today I made some nice progress again on the ModelConverterX tool. One of the new features I added is the option to scale your object, so that you can get the desired default size when placing your object with the XML code. Below you see a screenshot of the scale dialog. On the right you also see the toolbar with options that can be applied to the object.

 

There are still some bugs in the batch conversion functionality left, but once these have been solved I will upload a new version for you to play with.

Tango Desktop Project

Today I was looking around on the web for some icons to use in the ModelConverterX tool. Of course there are a lot of places where you can buy very expensive icons to use in your application, but that was not really what I was looking for. In the end I came across the Tango Desktop Project, a project with the aim to help create a consistent graphical user interface experience for free and Open Source software. They have a nice set of icons and I think you will see some of them appear in my tools in the future.