Live Meeting

While chatting with Nick today, we were looking for an easy way to show each other what we were doing on screen. For example to describe a bug or explain how we would like a feature to be. In the end Nick came up with a Microsoft Office Live Meeting test session and I must say that it worked great. It is a really helpfull tool when discussing things online. Being able to see how other people use the tools you have designed is also very useful, as it might not always be the way you thought people would use it.

But we do also see other cool things that we can do with Live Meeting, for example have a sort of online interactive tutorial session, where scenery design tools or techniques can be demonstrated, while people watch and ask their questions directly. Have a look at this thread at the SceneryDesign.org forum for a poll about this idea and hopefully we can do some trials with this idea soon.

Tool updating time

It was last friday that I had a nice chat with Nick once again (had
been some time ago) and in the process we came to talk about MDL
Tweaker as well. It seemed that Nick had not seen the latest beta version of that tool yet, so while chatting Nick started to test this version a bit. Of course he was able to produce some new bugs and errors for me very soon, as well as a lot of good ideas on how to improve features or the interface.

All these new ideas and suggestions, formed a very good motivation for me to do some coding work on MDL Tweaker right away. So this weekend I have been busy with implementing stuff from my wishlist. Once I have the remaining issues ironed out, you can expect a new beta release.

The most noticeable changes I have made until now deal with the object preview. First I have been able to make the drawing of the preview a lot faster. So where the CPU was often the limiting factor on drawing complex objects before, it now no longer is. Another important change is that the way the textures are searched has been changed. This means that loading the object will no longer take ages if the textures can not be found. Besides these two things, I have made a lot of other small changes as well, but you will have to wait for the release to see a full list of changes.

So thanks Nick, such chat sessions are really useful for the development of any tool. It really helps me to keep the end user in mind as well, as my own point of view on how the tool should works is often slightly different from what a average scenery designer would prefer.

Vliehors

I am back, hopefully the leakage has been fixed now (I still have the new sealant beneath my fingernails). I can’t say that I had much fun trying to fix the shower, now I know for sure that I am not really a do-it-yourselfer.

I can’t say that I did not have fun at all this last week, as I visited the shooting range of the Dutch airforce on the island of Vlieland. It was really cool to visit the control tower there and see the aircraft and helicopters fly by really close. We had a great day there, see the two photos below.

We did not only visit the range to watch the aircraft of course, we are also going to model it in the NL2000 scenery. So we took some good photos and notes for that as well. After all the repairing of my shower, I am really looking forward to spend more time on scenery design again this week.

Fixing a shower

I haven’t got much FS related to report at the moment, as almost all of my spare time is being spend on fixing my shower. Last week I noticed a little wet spot on the floor of my PC room and it turned out that the shower had slowly been leaking water into that room (which is next to the shower). As PCs don’t like wet feet in general, my first priority is now to fix this of course. So at the moment I am fighting with the old sealant, in an attempt to remove it. Once that is done applying some new to fix the leaking problem should be easy. And then I can finally spend some more time on FS stuff again as well, until then don’t expect me to be online very often.

Apron markings preview

A few days ago I posted about the apron markings I was working on and it works out quite nice I must say. For example, the performance has increased compared to the previous markings that were placed with Fs2000 style roads. And due to the way I generate these polygons now, the connection between the different line segments is also better (no gaps anymore).

Below you find two screenshots of these markings, to show you all what I am talking about. This is not yet the final version, as I still need to optimize things like the line width and the visibility range.

A new home for my blog

As you can see my blog has moved to a different server, thanks to Nick for setting this up. At the moment it is rather empty in here, so I guess I need to move the content to this new home as well. So please check back later.

Edit: All posts have been moved to here now. Only the comments seem to be a little hard to move from the old blog, so they are probably lost. All I have to do now is to setup the links, etc and everything is fine again.

Edit2: The links have been added again as well. So it seems the move is done now. If you find anything weird or not working, please let me know.

Markings

It has been a little quite here lately, but that does not mean I am not doing anything. So time for a little update. Apart from the fact that I have been away for a few days for work (attended a workshop in Engeland), I have also been working on the apron markings for the Schiphol scenery. Let me start with a little introduction on what we want to achieve in that scenery.

We want realistic markings, so that means we need more than only a yellow center line. We also need the red clearance lines for example or the white tow lines. And as the cream on the pudding we would also like to put in the road markings on the airside of the airfield (these will probably be optional, to keep the users with a not so fast PC happy as well). As we want more than only some yellow markings, it is clear that the XML options to place markings are not sufficient for use. Although I hope that in the future these XML markings will become more flexible, so that they allow those red lines and other cool stuff as well.

Another things that I should probably mention, is that we have been lucky to receive some data about which markings are where. That means that we do not have to draw them all by hand, but that we can use this data and convert it to some scenery. In the past I have made a converter for this and it created Fs2000 style roads for the apron markings. I used these as they are the easiest way to place lines with a certain width in the scenery and assign your own custom texture to it. But they also have a few downsides (of course). For example they are not floating point, so to prevent gaps between them you should use a rather small scale of the reference point. And another negative point seems that they are a little heavy on the frames if you use a lot of them. And I can assure we use them a lot, as there are a couple of ten thousand line segments on the airfield.

So now I have been trying to upgrade the converter a little bit and produce these markings in another few. And until now that is working out quite nice. Instead of placing all the markings as narrow roads, I am now drawing them as polygons using the floating point commands (like the Fs2002 GMax gamepack output for ground polygons, but then created by my own tool). The main advantage of this is that it seems to be better for the performance and also it makes it slightly easier to connect all the lines nicely together without gaps. To generate these polygons from the line data I am using the OGR library I talked about before. With this library I am merging all line segments in a certain area together and I then give this total line a buffer (so a width around it). The advantage of this method is that as all lines are first put together, the connections between the different segments are almost perfect. And luckily the library does most of the hard work for me.

I will try to post a few comparison images in the coming days, when I continue to test my new tool.

FsX video

This might be old news already for those hanging around the forums a lot, but there is a nice preview movie of FsX. I think it shows quite some very impressive scenery features. Can’t wait to use these in my addons…

GMax, FSDS3 and MakeMDL

With both GMax and FSDS3 now using MakeMDL to create the scenery MDL object, you would expect that the resulting code of these objects would be very similar, but while testing the output of both programs with some of my tools, it appears that this is not really the case.

Let me start by saying that I do not want to compare the features of GMax and FSDS3 here. Some users prefer the user interface of FSDS3, while others like the one of GMax. I want to discuss the differences in the code of the objects that are generated in the end.

As you might have guessed from my introduction, the created MDL files by GMax and FSDS are not as similiar as I had expected. Although there are some options on the MakeMDL GUI, it seems that not all logic to optimize the object is in MakeMDL itself. The tool that creates the X file for MakeMDL has to do part of the logic as well. So let me give you a few examples of differences.

When you create different objects in one scene, but they all use the same texture, GMax will optimize all these polygons into one list and thus only set that texture once. FSDS3 on the other hand does not do that and will set the texture again for each object (even though it might still be the active texture).

Another example is when you move an object in the design program. In GMax objects this movement will be taken into account when calculating the vertex list, while FSDS3 does use the vertices relative to the local object of that part. So an actual translation command is used in the MDL object to move it to the correct location again.

It looks to me as the GMax X files have been optimized better. Applying transformations that are static into the vertex coordinates seems a useful way to take as much calculations away from the scenery engine as possible.  And sorting polygons on the material or texture used, also seems a logical way to keep the amount of state changes as low as possible.

As most of my tools have been develloped and tested using GMax output files, it seems I will have some nice challenges to fix some bugs with FSDS3 objects and make the code general enough to read any MDL object.

Project management

This time I want to talk about something different than cool new techniques or tools. I would like to discuss the way I prefer to manage my scenery projects.

I think you will all know that you can generate quite a few (source) files when creating a scenery. And when you can keep them well organized it makes your work a lot easier. This became especially important for me, when we started to work together on the same airport with different designers in the NL2000 team. We started to use a CVS system to synchronise the sources between those different designers and to work with CVS easily we came up with a common project structure we now all use.

The first step is obviously to create a folder for our new scenery project. This can either be a airport or an object library or something else. In this base folder we have three folder:

scenery
texture
source

The scenery folder is clear of course, here all the final BGL files will be placed. And in the texture folder the DXT mipmapped versions of all textures are placed. By adding this base folder to the scenery library in FS, it is also very easy to have a look at your work in progress.

The source folder contains different subfolders again, for all sort of sources that you get. A few examples are:

asm
xml
gmax
mdl
texture
sca

This are just a few common ones, but depending on the files I collect during a project there can be others of course. The ASM folder would for example contain the ASM source files that have been tweaked manually, while all normally exported objects go into the MDL folder. The XML folder contains the source files for the object library of this project and also for the XML file used to place the objects for example. The texture folder contains the sources of the textures. Usually we use the Photoshop PSD format for that, as that allows you to store layers and stuff like that. ImageTool can then process these files into DXT BMP files easily.

With the help of a few BAT files to easily convert textures and tool like Library Creator XML and ObPlacer XML, I find this a very efficient and organized way to work.