Month: January 2007

In my last blog post I mentioned that the new [FwTools] version had solved most of the problems I had with my markings compiler. That is true, but it also turned out that the speed of the compiler had not improved. Let me take the center lines of Schiphol airport as an example. I finally figure out how to compile them without errors into a good looking scenery. But I should mention that there are about 13000 line segments that make up the marking on the entire airport. The tool I wrote combines these segments into LOD grids and also … Continue reading Slooooooooow compilation

In the past I have already written about the markings I was working on for the Schiphol scenery and at the moment I am finalizing them. The tool I made to convert the lines of these markings into polygons uses [OGR] as I wrote about in that earlier post as well. This week I updated to the latest version of [FwTools] and to my pleasant surprise it has become a lot more stable. In that past my tool sometimes choked on the amount of line segments I was feeding it, but now they are processed fine (although it still takes … Continue reading New FwTools version solves some of my trouble

As a little exception, this blog post has nothing to do with Flight Simulator. Sometimes, when I am not designing scenery or developing new tools, I like to play a computer game as well. Ever since I picked up a copy of the game Europa Universalis II from a bargain bin, I have been a great fan of the strategy games made by the Swedish company Paradox Interactive. In these games you start with a country in a historical setting and then you can try all sort of what-if scenarios to see if you can alter history a little bit. … Continue reading Europa Universalis

Those who visited the SceneryDesign.org forums in the past might recognise my old avatar in the picture on the left. This aircraft is (one of) my favorite aircraft and as it is a little unknown I was thinking about writing a blog post about it for a while already. So here is that blog post. For those that have not yet recognised hte aircraft from this little avatar, I am talking about the Douglas DC-5. Ever since I once borrowed the book “De Douglas DC-5” from Piet Kok from the library, I have liked this aircraft a lot. Currently I … Continue reading The forgotten Douglas

And again an ACES team member has entered the world of blogging, this time it is Mike Singer. Also it seems that Hal Bryan has moved his blog to the Live Spaces. I must say that I am very excited about all these new bloggers, I am really looking forward to reading their backgrounds and stories about FS. As Paul Lange already mentioned, it seems the blog draught is over…

At work my collegue and I, we are the ones working on the visual databases for the simulators, are quite well known for our excessive harddisk usage on our development systems. When we are using satelite images in these visual database, it is not that weird to have a few GB of images that we need to process. For example to cover the Balkan area or the entire country of the Netherlands. And then I am not even talking about high resolution images (that would increase the amount of diskspace used even more). During the processing of these images into … Continue reading Am I a data junkie?

If you have been reading the blogs of [JonPatch] or [Nick] this is not really news anymore, but I updated the links to MS blogs. Tim Gregson has a new blog location, and I added the blogs of Brett Schnepf (community development manager),  Rick Selby (lead game designer trainsim) and  Pat Cook (design director ACES).

On the FsDeveloper Wiki I have added a page that describes (part of) the FsX MDL format. At the moment mainly the sections involved in a simple scenery object are covered, as that is the part I mainly looked at for the ModelConverterX tool until now. Hopefully this page is useful to other programmers as well, when they want to read information from FsX MDL files. But in this blog post I want to try to explain some of the changes in less technical terms, so that also “normal” scenery designers can understand what effects the new MDL format might … Continue reading The FsX MDL format

I have made an alpha version of the new Library Creator XML version 2.0 available at the FsDeveloper forums. So if you want a GUI to create your FsX object libraries, give it a try! And as it still is an alpha version I can’t promise that it will be bug free.  

Both Owen and Nick blogged about the new Scenery Shortcut tool from Abacus in the last days. I must say that personally I don’t really get all the enthousiasm about this tool, as it does not seem to really add something new that you can’t do with the Mission Object Placement tool already. You can already save your scenery from the Object Placement tool directly. Just use the “Save scenery” button and that will generate a XML file that can be compiled with BGLComp into a BGL scenery file you can use in your scenery. So all you have to … Continue reading Scenery Shortcut