Do forums grow?

Lately [Nick] has been trying to hijack the SceneryDesign.org forums and today I finally gave in to him. So you can expect some changes to the forum in the near future. And of course Nick has no evil intentions with the forums, so you don't have to be afraid of it.

Now more seriously, as you probably know, we are both MVPs for Flight Simulator. And we would like to encourage discussion about addon development for Flight Simulator. So therefore we want to stimulate a community where addon designers can discuss all their problems. The SceneryDesign.org forums already provide that for scenery designers already, but we would like to expand it. Into aircraft design for example, but also into the new options that FsX will offer. So therefore we are going to transform it into a community for FS developers.

And no, the current users of the forum don't have to be scared for these changes. We keep seperate places to discuss these different subjects. Just stay tuned for more news. 

What is an AFCAD file?

Some time ago I blogged about the confusion that exists about SCASM BGL files and this time I want to discuss a similar naming confusing. It is about AFCAD files. On forums it is very common that you hear people talking about the AFCAD files they have made for their scenery. And I have already seen posts of people who tested the FsX demo and reported that their Fs9 AFCAD files still seemed to work fine.

But wait, I think we are missing something here. AFCAD files are nothing else than BGL files made according to the Fs2004 XML format (BGLComp SDK). As they are made with AFCAD we tend to call them AFCAD files, but with SceneGenX or a bit of handwritten XML code you could create exactly the same BGL file. So please keep that in mind when you see the term AFCAD files next time.

Of course AFCAD is a great tool, as it allows you to edit your scenery very easily. So I can very well understand that this naming confusing has appeared. AFCAD has allowed a lot of people who are not really scenery designers, to still make changes to their local airport.

But there is also a risk in this. Let's assume that you have made a nice XML file for a certain airport and you have handwritten some special commands into it to place a few objects and add an approach. If somebody will now try to load this file in AFCAD it will work just fine, but once they save it some of the commands you have put in there might be lost. This is because AFCAD does not understand those parts of the BGL file and has thus discarded this information. Knowing that Lee Swordy made the tool without proper information about the BGL format, this is something that is very understandable. But it is something we should keep in mind, as users tend to want to edit airports themself in AFCAD, for example for their AI traffic.

Especially with FsX around the corner this is something we should be aware of. How much will the XML format change in FsX? And how does it mix with the Fs2004 style XML files we have made before? That is something we should be very careful about and in those cases we should not forget that AFCAD files are just Fs2004 XML BGL files.
 

A new skin

As you can see I changed the skin that is used at the blog. As the software running this blog has been updated recently, the skin suddenly showed tags, instead of the posting categories. I really did not like how that looked, so that is why I am giving this one a try. I only need to figure out how to replace that silhouette at the top with a slightly more interesting image…

Another LiveMeeting

After the success of the first SceneryDesign.org LiveMeeting, we have now scheduled a second one. Where the first LiveMeeting was a short of online-video-tutorial-demonstration of the MDL Tweaker II tool, this second meeting will go a little more deeply into the techniques of scenery design. The subject will be how you can use XML for your 3D object design. So we will discuss things like how to place a MDL object using XML code or how to make an object library with the XML code. But the meeting will not only consist of boring source code and XML files (although I think it is important that you understand the basics of the underlaying XML format), we will also demonstrate some tools that can make your life easier and create the XML files for you. So if you want to know more about this, check the announcement on the forums!

ObPlacer XML and Rwy12 object libraries

After the release of EZ-Scenery, I have made a few posts on this blog about the object library mania that occured back then. As people tried to convert Rwy12 library into EZ-Scenery libraries, while they are actually almost the same (only the way the information about the library is read into the tool is different). In principle any object library made with the Fs2004 XML scenery format, should work fine with any of the object placement tools made for this XML format.

So, how about ObPlacer XML you might be thinking. That tool uses a different way to read the information about the library. While EZ-Scenery reads the information directly from the binary BGL file, Rwy12 uses its own XML format to store the information about names, GUIDs, etc. And ObPlacer XML reads the BGLComp XML files that you can also use to compile the library BGL. All those different formats can become rather confusing to the new users.

But I have now added a new feature to ObPlacer XML to make the life of the designer a little easier. ObPlacer XML can now also read the Rwy12 XML format, so that means you can now add libraries that have been released for Rwy12 easier to ObPlacer XML as well. So you know have the choice to either load a BGLComp XML file or a Rwy12 XML file to let ObPlacer XML now about the object library.

There are a few things I still need to finish, but I will try to release this new version within the coming days. And yes, I have also fixed the bug about the mixed up texture coordinates in the generic building preview.

A slow MDL Tweaker

About a week ago I received a message on the forum that MDL Tweaker crashed on a certain object. After the designer of the object send me his MDL file, I soon figured out why it crashed. This was simply the most complex object I had ever tried to load into MDL Tweaker and a few integers had an overflow because the object had more than 32768 vertices. This was not that hard to fix of course, I just had to make sure that these big integers were read correctly.

But after I had fixed the errors, MDL Tweaker did not behave as before. It was now possible to load the object, but it took a very long time to do so. I thought I had tried to load quite complex objects before, but this one was of a different order (the MDL file is over 1 MB in size). After I while I found out that the internal way I store the MDL object (using collections to store lists of vertices, BGL commands, etc) is not very efficient when these lists grow very long.

This weekend I was visiting my parents. Being away from the internet, that also meant that I could work quitely on an improved version of MDL Tweaker (the train journey also proved to be a good place to work). So I have now tried to make the preview as fast as possible and to prevent people from thinking the tool is no longer responding, I also added a screen that shows the loading progress while you open a MDL file. For a complex object, like the one I described above, the loading can still take a few minutes. But I don’t know if I can find an easy solution for that problem.

I have tried to put most code that takes a lot of time together when you first load the object. So that once it is loaded, the tool works as fast as possible. But unfortunately this is not possible everywhere. Some forms need to collect some information about the object when they are loaded and iterating through the object in memory takes some time on big objects. So in those cases you will have to be patient and don’t think the tool has crashed.

I have now almost finished a new version of MDL Tweaker, so it will be released in a few days. Besides fixing the crash I mentioned and improving the loading of the object, there are some other small improvements. For example you can now select vertices in the vertex list based on the texture applied to them. So this makes it easier to select all vertices that belong to your trees for example (so that you can unify there normals).

Running a forum

I have been running the SceneryDesign.org forums for about 3 years now and I must say that a lot has changed over these years. When I started the site, I was looking for a place to store the tips and tricks I had on my personal homepage. And I added the forum to see if a place to discuss scenery design related topics would be useful as well. By now I think we can say that the forum has been found useful by the visitors. There is a base of regular visitors and a lot of designers know to find the forum with their design problems.

But unfortunately this popularity of the site also seems to have a downside. Lately I am getting a lot of fake registrations from people (or I guess it are actually bots, as they all select the first country in the list when registering, with happens to be Afganistan) using emails addresses that do not exist. Luckily this only generate some emails with errors for me and now and then I do clean those accounts that never get activated.

But the last few days it seems some of them actually take the effort to activate their account properly and start posting spam on the forums. These spam posts only happened in the News forum until now and that forum us moderated, so that prevents them from being visible right away. Hopefully the spam with not spread into the other subforums.

I guess the future will learn if this problems keeps increasing or dies again. Until now it is manageable or else I might have to look for some extra moderators to help in cleaning the forums.

Of course trouble like this never take away the fun of running the forums. All the interesting discussions going on are a good source of inspiration for new ideas and techniques. And of course helping a new scenery designer to find his way into this great hobby is also a nice thing to do.

Back home

I am back home and had a great vacation on Corsica. It is a really nice island to cycle around (although we only saw the northern part of it), with a lot of nice hills and mountains to climb. And every time a fantastic view on the landscape and the sea.

So now that I am back I am trying to catch up with everything I missed. An interesting FsX demo seems to be one of those things.

Ready to go…

It is summer again, so that means it is also time for a vacation. The next three weeks I am free from work and tomorrow my two week vacation to Corsica starts. I have booked a group travel and we’ll be cycling around the northern part of the island. Luckily I will not have to carry all my stuff (like a tent, sleeping bag, etc) on the bicycle as well, the group leader will carry that for us with a van.

I am really looking forward to this vacation. It is very nice to be totally away from work and computers for two weeks. I find it very relaxing to cycle around, enjoy the landscape, the food, the weather, etc. Of course cycling in a country that is not as flat as the Netherlands will be more tiring, but that is part of the fun. At least you have a nice view when you have climbed a hill or mountain.

I am sure I’ll meet some nice people again in the group and I will have a good time. So see you again in two weeks time and in the mean time I won’t see a computer, so I will not post anything or read any emails.

The image below is from last year, when I cycled in Navara (Spain).