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.

OpenFlight exporter for ModelConverterX

I can remove the first item from my “what I would like to do during the Christmas vacation” list. Today I finished the OpenFlight exporter functionality of the ModelConverterX tool. With this functionality it is possible to save the loaded objects in the OpenFlight format that is often used in image generators of professional flight simulators. The object shown in the picture below is an old API macro of a museum that I exported to OpenFlight and then loaded into OpenSceneGraph to visualize it.

 

The exporter is not yet perfect of course, it only supports static objects at the moment. And also levels of details are not yet supported. But that are things on my wish list and now that the basic functionality is there it is a lot easier to add new things to it.

I have also made progress on improving the SCASM reader in the last days. Especially the part that processing the old SCASM Poly and TexPoly commands has been improved a lot, so that more macros can be read correctly now. There are still some minor problems I need to fix, but I feel I am getting closer to a next alpha version that will be released to the public.

Blog theme (changed again)

You might have noticed that over the last days I changed the theme a few times. Yesterday I thought I had found the one I liked most (the white one), but today I found out that it does not list the links to the ohers blogs. So I switch back to another theme again. But don’t worry, I don’t plan to keep switching daily. Or maybe I should try to make my own FSDeveloper style theme once…

Bye bye ObPlacer XML, welcome WhisPlacer

With FSX MS shipped a tool that allows you to place objects (and design mission), the Object Placement Tool (OPT). But because the interface is not really easy to use, alternative placement tools have appear, as they also did in FS2004. For FS2004 you had for example Rwy12, EZ-Scenery or ObPlacer XML. Now for FSX we also have Whisplacer or Instant Scenery. Some of these tools are freeware, other are payware, and also the features they contain can differ a bit.

For a while I have been planning to make an updated and improved version of ObPlacer XML for FSX. But when I today checked out the latest version of WhisPlacer I realized that I don’t have to do that anymore. That is because with WhisPlacer there already is a good, freeware tool that allows you to place your scenery objects in an easy way. And not only scenery objects, it also allows you to make Generic Buildings for example, with a preview similar to the one ObPlacer XML has.

And the good news is that you can just load your object library BGL files in it and open the XML file that ObPlacer XML made. After that you can continue your development in WhisPlacer, without having to start completely from scratch. So I would advice everybody looking for a good, freeware replacement for the OPT tool in FSX, to give WhisPlacer a try. And then I did not even mention the best part, it also has the Live Preview functionality of the OPT tool, yippee!