Log it!

There is a new feature in the latest MDL Tweaker II release that I did not yet point out. This new feature is the event log screen. When there is a warning or an error this will be the place to look for the message.

The image above shows three warnings for missing textures. So whenever your preview seems to miss some textures, have a look at the Event log first to see if there were problems loading them. You can find the Event log in the Window menu.

To be honest, at the moment the warnings for missing textures are the only ones written to the event log, but in the future other messages will be placed here as well. For example about tweaks you have applied or problems that happened when applying them. I do plan to make the event log appear automatically when an error occurs, while you should open it manually for warnings. But that is something for the future, for now if you miss textures, check the log.

Complex conditions

Last weekend I released a new version of MDL Tweaker II and in this blog post I want to point out a few of the improvements of this version. The feature that has been improved most is the condition manager. Not only has the user interface changed, hopefully it is even easier to use now, but also the types of conditions you can apply has been extended. In the previous version multiple conditions on the same object always meant that all these conditions had to be true, for the object to display. But this new version does also allow other combinations of multiple conditions. For example one of the conditions must be true, none of the conditions must be true, or one of the conditions must not be true.

This can for example be useful if you want to display an object between minute 45 and 15 of the hour. As this passes the 60 minute border, this condition would become either the minute is between 45 and 60 OR it is between 0 and 15. With the new condition manager that is now possible.

Another nice improvement is the preview window. Instead of using buttons to zoom, there is now a slider where you can set the amount of zoom. This should be a lot easier to use (in the end I would prefer to use the mousewheel for the zoom, but at the moment trying to get that to work makes the tool just to unstable). And another improvement of the preview is the overal speed of drawing it. In the previous version this was often CPU limited, while I have now optimized the OpenGL code more. So it should no longer eat all your CPU and rotations of complex objects go more smooth.

With all those improvements done, I hope to be able to put some effort in reading transformations and animations now, as that is an important area that MDL Tweaker can not yet read. Once I have some progress on that, you’ll certainly read it here again.

Awesome

I would like to point your attention to cool OpenSource project this time, OSSIM. At work we make use of this tool to mosaic different aerial images for example. But it can do a lot other image manipulating related tasks as well, like color matches between different images or reprojecting images to a different projection. So have a look at this awesome tool.

While reading the manual of OSSIM, I noticed that it should also be able to do image tiling. This could be a useful feature when trying to make the tiles for a high resolution ground layout. But I haven’t been able to get that feature working completely, I’ll make a new post about this once I got it fully working.

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.