Airport Facilitator X

Flight1 has released a new scenery design tool, Airport Facilitator X. I have not (yet) tried this new tool, but looking at the info and pictures they provide it seems to extend AFCAD. Of course it is always good to build on such a nice tool.

The tools works with both Fs2004 and FsX, and for FsX they have added support for some of the new features like blast fences and jetways. Another nice feature seems that it can link with FS to show you what you are doing in the sim while you are making the changes. I can imagine some occasions that that would be useful.

On the other hand, it does not seem to add all the features that were missing in AFCAD to make it a really perfect tool. For example I don’t see placing scenery objects on the feature list. (I can understand they did not put it in, as they have their Instant Scenery tool for that). And their are more XML commands that BGLComp provides, but AFCAD does not support.

As you might know there are also some freeware tools being developed at the moment that are working on similar functionality. The two that come to my mind right away are FSXPlanner and ADE. In general I think these are trying to offer a bigger scope of features, so that you can design your entire airport with one tool. But on the other hand they are still under development and might contain some bugs. So for a designer that just wants to make some adjustments for which he (or she) used AFCAD before the new Airport Facilitator X tool looks like a good (and easy) choice. And for those that want more, it is good to see that there are some alternative around. Some competition is always good I think.

A little bit of success

I just succeeded in exporting my first object from ModelConverterX back into FsX. In a previous post I showed a museum building that I had loaded into ModelConverterX from an API macro. Now I have been able to write it as a X file again, which I compiled into a FsX MDL file with XtoMDL. And the screenshot below shows you that it shows up in FS like it should.

So that means that the tool is getting close to actually doing what I want it to do. Loading in objects in one format and then saving them in another. But before I can release the first test version to the public, there are some things that I need to improve:

  1. The API loading code must be improved, as I have only tested it with two or three macros until now. I am sure that the next one I try contains some unsupported SCASM commands. So I want to test it a little more, to make sure a wider set of SCASM commands can be read.
  2. The user interface needs to be improved a little bit, as at the moment I have some hardcoded stuff in there for the debugging. Of course the first test version does not have to be perfect, but it should at least allow you to specify the filename you wish to save to.

Besides these two important things that I need to fix before I can reelase, there are also some smaller things I want to look at. For example I need to make sure that the X file I am writing is as optimal as possible, so I will have to examine the MDL file and see if it has a weird structure or contains weird things. And also the 3D preview in the tool needs a little work, as you can only zoom on the picture now.

But for today I am quite happy to have something working, although there is always more to do. I’ll let you know once I have some more progress again. 

XtoMDL does not yet like my X files

 Yesterday I wrote about the continuing work on ModelConverterX. As I already mentioned then, watching the Tour de France delayed my progress a little bit. But I got as far as exporting my object as a FsX X file. At least that is what I thought. But XtoMDL does not yet seem to agree with me, as it refuses to compile the X file into a MDL. So I guess I have some more debugging to do, to see where I made the error in the X file.

But at least I seem close to having an API macros being compiled into a FsX MDL file, so I hope I can have it fully working by the end of this week. You’ll be able to read on this blog if I can really hunt the bug down that fast. 

NL2000 version 3

As you might have read on the internet already, the new version of the [NL2000] scenery has been released. This latest release is for Fs2004 and again covers the entire country, with all its airports. The main difference is that this time the entire country has been filled with 1 meter per pixel photo scenery, hence the big download size of around 22 GB.

Personally I am very happy that this scenery has finally been released. Not because that means that the scenery is ready, but because that means I can now finally spend all my time on FsX. I have not really enjoyed working on a Fs2004 scenery, while FsX had long been released. But as a member of a team, you are not alone in setting the directions of course.

So I have also decided that this was the last NL2000 version I will be building scenery for. From now on I want to concentrate on the [FsDeveloper] community and on new tools and techniques. So I hope to be able to make some new tutorials and tools soon.

This weekend I already started work on the ModelConverterX tool again. Today I hope to make a start with the exporting functionalty, so that I can save my imported API as a FsX MDL object. If the Tour de France does not draw me too much to the television today, I hope to get the basics working.

 

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.