Vacation is getting nearer

It is Thursday morning now and I don’t have to work, that’s a nice feeling. Or maybe I should say I am not sitting in the office, as there is some hard work ahead. I’ll have to try to pack all my stuff for my vacation that starts this Monday. I am going to Andalusia (Spain) this year and just like last year I will be going to do a combination of cycling and camping again.

But where I travelled by bus last year, we are going to fly this time. So how do I get my sleeping bag, mattress, cycling helmet, and all those stuff you need in one bag of less than 20 kg? It is good that I have some time now to try how to get that done.

And the first alpha version of ModelConverterX has also resulted in the first bug reports, so I hope to get an updated version done before I leave. But let’s first pack all the stuff.

 

Working with the GeoTIFF library

I came across this interesting article on how to use the GeoTIFF library today. This might be of interest for FS scenery tool designers as well, since the GeoTIFF format can now be used with the FsX resample. So that makes the GeoTIFF format also interesting for background images in tools for example.

ModelConverterX update

Remember the Starfighter screenshot in my previous ModelConverterX post? (If not, please scroll down a little bit). It had some nice pink wheels and a bright green canopy. This evening I have been able to fix these bugs and also export this old API static as a FsX MDL file and place it in FsX. Below you can see a screenshot of how it then looks.

 

 I have also started to make the interface a little more user friendly and remove some debugging features. Once that is done I will put a first beta (or should I say alpha) version on the website. So that those of you who dare to test this new tool can give it a try. Because I am sure that I need some feedback on crashes from your API macros to make the tool more robust. I hope to have this test version ready near the end of this week.
 

ModelConverterX progress report

After spending most of my spare time on the upcoming FsDeveloper update in the last two weeks, I was able to get some work done on the ModelConverterX tool again this evening. In my last update on this tool, I mentioned that the code to read the API macros needed some more work and that is what I worked on today. I have improved the reader now, so that it can better read the Fs2002 floating point style API macros (for example generated with FSDS2). Below you see a little screenshot of a F-104 Starfighter static I once made loaded into the tool.

 

As you will probably see some of the colours do look a little weird still (or would pink wheels be the new fashion colour?), so I still have a little work to do. But I feel that I am getting closer to releasing a test version of the tool that can actually do some useful conversion for the tester as well.

As I will be away the rest of this weekend, I won’t be able to get that test version ready in the next few days, so that will have to wait till next week. But at least you know now that there is a little bit of progress again. 

LibraryThing

I have quite some books (despite my not so old age). I guess if I keep collecting them at this pace I will need a bigger house soon to store them, or I might have to give up some more space in the living room. In the past I have tried some computer programs to catalog all the books I have, but I never found any that I found easy to work with.

But last week I read in the newspaper about a site called LibraryThing. As a test I entered about two shelves of my books and I think I like the site. It makes use of different online databases, so that makes finding the books based on for example the ISBN number quite easily. And you can also see how many other people on the site have the same book and the reviews they entered for it.

And they also have a cool widget that you can use to show your collection on your blog for example. So below you can see part of the books I already entered. So if you are looking for a way to catalog your books as well, check out this site.

FsDeveloper work in progress

As Nick already hinted at in his recent blog post, we have finally started to implement the change to the FsDeveloper website that I already talked about before.

Today I have played with the settings to integrate the wiki and the forums a lot better and I can say that I got it working quite well. This integration means that you can use your forum account now as well to log into the wiki. Besides that the wiki pages are now also integrated into the layout of the forums, which means that it should be a lot easier to navigate around. So the wiki will no longer look completely separate from the rest of the community. Hopefully that will also encourage people to use the wiki more.

There are some other things that we need to check and tweak before these changes will be put online. So at the moment you won’t notice anything different yet at the site. Once everything is ready, we’ll have to get the site down for a few hours to transition it to the updated version we are working on now. Before we do that, we will inform you about when this is going to happen and what you will notice of it of course. As we want to do proper testing, I think it can take about two weeks before we are going to actually do that move. 

ObPlacer XML update

I have just released a small update for ObPlacer XML. This new version (0.84) does not have that many changes, but some recent discussions in the community still encouraged me to release it now.

This first change is that it includes a new feature, you can now also place a fuel trigger object. For this object you specify the length and width and then if you park your aircraft inside that “box” it will be refueled again. This trigger code does not produce any visual scenery, but without it your visual model of the fuel area does not work either.

The other changes have to do with FsX. The previous version has some trouble on PCs that only had FsX installed, so I tried to fix these. For example the tool does not also check the registry for FsX, if it can not find Fs2004 installed. And FSUIPC4 is now also recognised as having FSUIPC installed. So this should allow you to use ObPlacer XML with FsX as well.

Of course that does not mean yet that ObPlacer XML makes use of FsX features or changes. You can just use the Fs2004 features in FsX as well now. But new FsX style MDL objects are not yet supported. I have been thinking about a new (and bigger) update to add more FsX features, but that is something for the longer term. I think that update would also be a complete redesign in C#, just like I did with Library Creator XML before. So that will take a while, as the ModelConverterX tool has a higher priority for me at the moment.

I just realized that I forgot to mention the random scale tool in the release notes. As I pointed out in this blog post before, that is also a new feature in ObPlacer XML that comes with the new version that I just released.