While I was away…

While I was away to Cologne this week to attend a exhibition for my work, it seems quite a few interesting things happened in the FS world. Here is a quick summary of all the things I seem to have missed:

  •  The software of the community server this blog is on has been updated, all seems running fine now but you might have noticed in the process.
  • The ACES team updated their FsInsider site, I think the new version is a lot easier to use and find the information you want. And besides that it also just looks better, so check it out.
  • The FsArchitect scenery design tool has become freely available now.
  • On the forums some interesting tools have been announced by Sean (theisomizer).

Did you say manual?

I know some time has passed since I said that I would make a manual for Library Creator XML 2.0. But the good news is that I actually started doing so today. So once that is ready, you can expect a non beta release of this new version, as it seems quite stable at the moment.

I just also mention that this weekend I found a bug in the tool, sometimes the new GUIDs for Fs2004 MDL files are not determined correctly. This results in compilation error, but has been fixed now. So with the next release you will get this fix.

As a little teaser, here is a screenshot of the new manual option, that allows you to read the manual from within the tool. It automatically gets the latest version of the manual for you from the Wiki.


 

Spammers be gone!

You might know that I have blogged a few times already about the spammers that annoy me daily. Ever way you have on your website to let the users interact with you, seems to be misused by spammers as well. Let me name a few examples.

On this blog you can leave a comment, but about 99% of the comments I receive are spam. That is also the reason that the comments don’t appear right away. I have to approve them first, so that the spam will not flood you.

A few months ago I already mentioned that the talk page on the Wiki was also used to post spam to. And the last week it seems they have also found out that the connect form on the forums can be used to send stuff. So I get some spam on it daily now.

It is quite annoying to get all those useless messages. I always wonder why they send out that stuff anyway, all you do when you get it is press the Delete button and be annoyed. I always wonder how stupid the people are that really respond to it and make those spammers continue doing it as they can earn money with it.

Let’s hope the amount of spam does not increase future, as that might mean that the way to interact with the community members has to be restricted even further, which is not something I would like to do.

 

Some Wiki maintenance

Yesterday I performance some maintenance on the FsDeveloper Wiki. Just some common tasks like assigned uncategorized articles to a category, so that they can be found more easily. While doing that I also noticed that some user(s) have been working hard to get some basic information about mission design onto the Wiki. So if you are into mission design as well, check it out and add your own knowledge.

Another new category on the Wiki is called File Formats, it contains information about the different file formats used in FS. At the oment the focus is mainly on the MDL format, but if you know some good details about other formats, don’t be shy to add them as well.

 

April 1st joke?

Yesterday I found an email message from MS in my inbox. Although the date might make you a little suspicious, this email was certainly no joke. My MVP award has been extended for another year, so that is great news.

Time has gone quite fast the last year, it does not seem like a year ago that I got my award. Hopefully this next year will also bring good interaction with the ACES team, to the benefit of FS and the developer community.

Got a new bike!

I had been looking around for a new bike for weeks already and today I finally bought one. And to prevent some confusion right away, with bike I don’t mean such a thing that has an engine, but a bicycle. Now that spring is coming around again, I am looking forward to take the bicycle to my work again. Hopefully the weather will be good enough already in two weeks time when my current monthly train ticket ends.

For those people from abroad where it might not be so common to use a bicycle, I tried to find some statistics. Here in the Netherlands we have around 18 million bicycle (for 16 million people), so I guess you can say that they are very common here. Giving the fact that the country is so flat, they are a perfect way to travel for short distances of course. Yearly about 14 billion kilometers are travelled by bicycle, so that is around 900 km per person per year.

Personally I guess I am helping to keep the figures up. Including my new bicycle I own three now for example. I have one racing bicycle I use to make trips with during the weekend (you know, the kind of bicycles they drive the Tour de France with as well). And I have two normal bicycles now, as I will keep my old one as a spare. I use these to go to work in the summer and most other local travel.

Also for the amount of kilometers I help to keep the statistics up a little bit. Last year I drove around 3000 km, which does not even include all short visits to the local shop, etc. Let’s see if I can improve on that this year. Given the fact that from home to work is already 20 km, so 40 km a day, it should be possible to get a nice amount of kilometers again this year. Hopefully the weather will be fine this spring/summer/autumn, so that I can cycle to work often. At least I find it a very good method to combine a bit of sports with the travelling that I have to do to get to work anyway.

What will the new Library Creator XML 2.0 build bring?

This night I made some nice progress again on the next alpha build of Library Creator XML 2.0. I have mainly been focussing now on the features to make the tool more user friendly to use. So for example I have coded the part again that shows the 8 most recent library XML files that you opened. So that you can much faster reload them. Another item on my todo list is to detect changes being made. So that the user can be asked if he wants to save these changes when he quitst the tool without first saving his work.

In this next build I will also add the ability to export the Rwy12 XML files again, so that all functionality of the 1.0 version can now also be found in the 2.0 one. So maybe I can better call this next build a beta version, as it should be quite stable and functional by now. I expect the next build somewhere this weekend.

And I do promise that while you will be testing this next build, that I will start on writing a manual for this new version of Library Creator XML.
 

Are nice people born in March?

The forum software that we use at the FsDeveloper website has the option to automatically send a congratulation email to user that have their birthday at this day. Of course this only happens if the user has entered his day of birth. Sometimes I get a reply on these automatic messages, usually just a quick thanks. But in the last two days I got about 3 such replies, which is a lot more than usual. So this made me wonder, would people born in March be friendlier?

Library Creator XML 2.0, a new build

I have just uploaded a new build of Library Creator XML 2.0 alpha to the forums. In this latest build I have added back most of the functions that are available in the 1.0 version. Only the Rwy12 export is still missing, I will try to add that again in the next build.

But I have also added some completely new functionality. You can now drag and drop your MDL files onto the tool from Windows Explorer. This makes it even easier to add objects to your object library.

So check out this latest version and as soon as I have added all functionality back, I will also start to write a good manual.