GFL SDK

Loading in all the different kind of textures that FS supports in a tool can be a quite challenging task. Some scenery object use 8 bit textures, others 32 bit, or compressed DXT textures. Some objects even still use the old RAW textures with a palette. And in FsX the DDS format has been added to this long list.

For my MDL Tweaker tool I have used the graphical DLL files by Martin Wright to help me reading the different (compressed) textures that FS supports. But yesterday when working on ModelConverterX I can across another library that can also help me with this subject, GFL SDK. This is the library that is behind the XnView thumbnail viewer as well. Using this library made my job of loading textures a lot easier and the library also provides some functionality to edit the textures (in case I ever need that).

So if you are having trouble with loading all those different texture formats in your tool, you might want to check out this nice library as well.
 

Two new FS MVPs

Two more FS MVPs have been added recently, Lefteris Kalamaras and Brian
Gefrich. Congratulations to them and I think we should be very happy with the increasing number of FS MVPs around in the community. Also check Owens blog post with some more info about these new MVPs.
 

Jetlag

Just got home this morning from my trip to Texas, so at the moment I have a slight jetlag. And to make things even better, my suitcase did not appear on the baggage carousel when the flight arrived. Luckily I already got a call from KLM that they found it though, so it should be delivered this afternoon.

On the flight from Dallas to Houston that we made, I had a window seat. And I must say that the view out of the window looked a lot like Flight Simulator (or was it it the other way around). The landscape over there is a lot different from here in Europe and you can see that the default textures work out a lot better for the US.

I guess I will need the rest of this weekend to catch up with my email and all the forums posts I missed. So you will see me appearing on the forums again soon.

Small Library Creator XML update

I have just released a small update of Library Creator XML. This new version has one new feature, the ability to copy the GUID of a selected object to the clipboard, so that you can paste it into some XML code or another tool more easily. Besides that I fixed some problems. For example a crash that happened when you compiled a BGL that FsX still had locked or a GUID reading problem for FsX objects, which caused problems with the API, SBuilder and Rwy12 export functionality.

Always those blurries

A topic that appears very often on the [FsDeveloper] is the appearance of blurries in FS, usually related to developers adding their new content when it starts to appear. Unfortunately this is not a problem that has a single simple solution to it, but Phil Taylor has now posted some information on his blog that will surely help is in understanding and solving such problems faster.

Replacement jetways

Since last week I have been playing with the new jetway feature of FsX, to see if I can get my own jetway model used in there. I still need to learn a little more about bones, skins and IK animations to get it all working on a proper jetway model, but tonight I learned a very valuable lesson.

If you are trying to use the GUID of a jetway model in the XML Jetway command and the objects do not appear, please make sure that the three IK handles as described in the SDK (IK_MainHandle, IK_SecondaryHandle and IK_WheelsGroundLock) are implemented in your model. If you use the GUID of a model that does not have them, nothing will show at all. So not even a static jetway. Took me a little while to figure that out.

Once I also got the animation working properly (only did some test IK animations until now), you can be sure I will report back again. But I am confident now that it will be possible to replace the default jetway model, with one that looks more like the real jetways on the airport.

 

Some changes ahead

We have been planning this for a while already, but now the implementation is getting close. So I think this is a nice time to talk a little bit about it as well. In an attempt to make the [FsDeveloper] webiste even more useful we will be making some changes soon. The most important are:

  • Better integration of the Wiki and the rest of the webiste
  • Improved navigation to find your way around easier (for example to the download section)

 Besides that we are also going to move the hosting, so all this means that in the coming weeks the site will be down sometimes while we perform these upgrades. Of course we will try to minimize the downtime as much as we can. And once we know more precise when we will be working on it, you will be informed as well of course. So keep an eye on the news section at FsDeveloper or this blog.

Preserve those geo tags

A while ago I wrote about using FwTools to create or manipulate GeoTIFF images for use with the resample tool. One common problem I did not mention right then is that the tags containing this geo information are not understood by every tool. If you for example open the image in a painting program, like PhotoShop or Paint Shop Pro, to make some changes to it, the image will be saved back to disk as a normal TIFF file. I have now extended the tutorial on the Wiki with a small section about how to save this geo information and later put it back. That allows you to easily restore it after editing the image in your favorite tool.

ModelConverterX, now with textures

Remember that ugly picture I posted a few days ago of the API macro I had read into ModelConverterX? Today I did some work to let it also read in the colors and textures used and after that I must say that it already looks a lot more like the museum building it is supposed to be.

But although it looks like a real buildings now, that does not mean that the first alpha version of the tool is almost there. There are still a few things I need to do:

  1. Test with some more API macros and SCASM files, so that I am sure the tool can read the most often used commands.
  2. Make the tool a little more robust, at the moment it still throws too much errors if something unexpected happens. That is fine for development/debugging purposes, but not when other designers will try to use it.
  3. And finally (and most important) I need to write an exporter that allows me to save the read in SCASM object as a MDL object again. Or maybe as a X file to be processed with XtoMDL, I have not decided on that yet.

So for now enjoy the screenshot and I will post again when I have some more progress to report.

 

 

The curved earth

 Ever since FsX has been released, there have been a lot of discussion about the display problems with the old style ground polygons that are used a lot in addon sceneries. In FsX they have added an additional curvation of the earth, but these older polygons remained as flat as they ever where, so that meant they did no longer follow the terrain correctly over greater distances. With SP1 some changes has be made, to quote Pill Taylor:

“Made
significant progress to try to better map large, legacy add-on scenery to
correct for the new round Earth modeling in FSX. NOTE:  There will still be some
problems seen with this, but we’ve done our best to minimize the visual
artifacts.“

So what does that mean for the addon developer? Yesterday I have been testing the ground polygons I had used on a general aviation I made a few months ago. For this airfield I had used GMax (with the Fs2002 gamepack) to make different layers of ground polygons. First there is a layer that contains an aerial image, this layer consists of two polygons of 1×1 km with each a 1024×1024 texture mapped on that. On top of this layer I put a noise texture to make the grass of the airport look less blurry when you taxi on it (a bit like the noise you see in the mesh scenery as well) and finally a layer that contains all the aprons and taxiways as polygons.

When I first loaded this airport in FsX it did not really show up like it should. There was a flatten problem, so I first made a new flatten with SBuilderX to be sure that the ground was flat underneath my airport (flat, but still curved of course). After that I noticed that all the aprons show up fine, but the layer with the aerial images did not.

Remembering that there was some discussion about the fixes that MS has added in SP1 only working on small polygons (about 100 meter in size), I decided to see what happened when I would split my polygon that contains the aerial images into more slices. So I used to slice tool of GMax to turn my 1×1 km polygon into a nice grid of 100×100 meter tiles. And guess what, when using this grid everything shows up perfectly in FsX. These smaller size polygons are nicely bended by the scenery engine to follow the earth curvation.

So what does that mean for when you are making ground polygons for FsX? The first conclusion is that not so many has actually changed. You can still export your polygons with a single reference, there is no need to give each 100×100 meter tile its own reference point. But you need to remember to add some extra vertices to your polygon if it is big. I have not checked until which tile size it still displays fine, so maybe 200×200 meter tiles also work. But I can tell you that 100×100 meter works for sure.

I think you can compare how the scenery engine does this with the bend tool we have in GMax itself. When you try to use it on simple 4 vertex polygon it does not work. But if you then slice your polygon into more segments, you will see that you can give it a bend with the modifier. This much be exactly the same the scenery engine now does to our ground polygon, all we need to do is give it a few more vertices to do its calculations with.

Does this now mean that we can continue developing addon scenery like we “always” did? Well maybe, but I would still encourage everybody to take a good look at the new features FsX offers us. In quite a few cases I think that the new increased mesh resolution can be a good replacement for the ground polygons we have used in the past. But of course there are also cases where these polygons are still the best option, markings on an airfield is one of these cases that comes to my mind right away.