Month: December 2005

I think every scenery designer will know how to do this. Just do something slightly wrong in your addon BGL file and FS will clearly tell you it does not like your new file. Especially when you start to tweak the ASM or SCASM source codes manual it is very easy to do something wrong. But while working on MDL Tweaker II last evening I was able to make it crash even better. As you might know MDL Tweaker II does edit the MDL files directly, so I am writing the binary code to it directly. And while testing the … Continue reading How to crash FS

Are you all anxiously waiting for you presents from Santa? I am not, as here in the Netherlands Santa is usually called Sinterklaas and already comes at the beginning of December (this is a long story, but actually both are the same. You can read more about it on Wikipedia). But this interesting story is not really the reason of my post. I do have a week off between Christmas and New Year, so I plan to play for Santa a little bit myself. I want to finish some work I have been doing on my tools. There are some … Continue reading How about some presents from Santa?

I want to start with a little warning. I am afraid this post is going to be rather long, so if you are already desperately in need of coffee now, you’d better get a cup before reading the rest of this. So what is this OpenFlight you are talking about you might think? OpenFlight is not some sort of open source Flight Simulator or so. No it is a very common format to store your scenery in, for professional flight simulators. In this article I want to talk about the similarities between this format and the BGL format of Flight … Continue reading OpenFlight

At work we use a tool called TerraVista to create the visual databases. This tool has some very interesting features, that are certainly part of my imaginary ultimate-scenery-design tool. TerraVista for example allows you to import a lot of different data types. DEM altitude data, aerial or satelite photos, vector data for roads, etc. You can import them all, from a lot of different formats. If TerraVista knows the projection used in the data, it is able to combine them all for the project you are working on. You can also determine rather flexibile how you want to use your … Continue reading TerraVista

The different projection systems used in geographical data might be one of the aspects of MSFS scenery design that most designers know hardly anything about. But it surely a very important thing. Almost each country has its own projection system and although most of these systems will give you the position in either degrees or meters, that does not mean that it will all fit together. So when using data to design your scenery it is a good idea to take a look at which projection system they use. In the terrain SDK it is written that the MSFS mesh … Continue reading The projection hell

As you can see I do now also have my own blog. Welcome to all who have found it. Most will probably now me from my scenery design activities for Microsoft Flight Simulator. And as the name of my blog suggests I will post mainly about this subject as well. But that’s not all. Let me start with a slightly longer introduction about myself. Besides MS Flight Simulator and especially the scenery design, I also have a big interest in aviation in general. That all started when my parents took me in a plane for the first time to go … Continue reading I’ve got my own blog