Month: May 2007

Remember that ugly picture I posted a few days ago of the API macro I had read into ModelConverterX? Today I did some work to let it also read in the colors and textures used and after that I must say that it already looks a lot more like the museum building it is supposed to be. But although it looks like a real buildings now, that does not mean that the first alpha version of the tool is almost there. There are still a few things I need to do: Test with some more API macros and SCASM files, … Continue reading ModelConverterX, now with textures

 Ever since FsX has been released, there have been a lot of discussion about the display problems with the old style ground polygons that are used a lot in addon sceneries. In FsX they have added an additional curvation of the earth, but these older polygons remained as flat as they ever where, so that meant they did no longer follow the terrain correctly over greater distances. With SP1 some changes has be made, to quote Pill Taylor: “Made significant progress to try to better map large, legacy add-on scenery to correct for the new round Earth modeling in FSX. … Continue reading The curved earth

At the beginning of this year, I wrote a few blog posts about the ModelConverterX tool I had started working on. Then I was working on the reader to read FsX MDL files. Last week I also started on a reader that can read SCASM source files, for example API or SCM macros. I certainly can’t read any object yet, actually at the moment the reader can only read basic vertex and polygon information. But still I wanted to show you all this first progress, to let you know that there is some progress. Below you see a picture of … Continue reading ModelConverterX

The last days I have seen a few posts on forums about people having difficulty running FsX after installing SP1 or SP1A for the SDK. It seems that it is not clear to everybody that you need to install both service packs, as FsX SP1 does not work with the old SDK DLL files and the old FsX does not work with the SDK SP1A DLL files. So please make sure that you patch both FsX and the SDK to the latest version.

I am sure most of you have already read this at a million of places, but for the few that don’t know it yet: service pack 1 (SP1) for FsX has been released. Go get it as fast as you can as it does a lot of good to the performance of FsX. The ACES team has done very good work on SP1. And for all the developers watching my blog, make sure you also get the SDK update that matches SP1, you need it. Also check out this post by Nick, he has collected some very interesting links to … Continue reading FsX SP1 released

For the new model conversion tool I am working on at the moment, I took a closer look at the COLLADA format this weekend. COLLADA is an open standard Digital Asset schema for interactive 3D applications. It can for example be used as an exchange format to share models between different tools. That is also the role in which I want to use it in my tool. There are for example COLLADA plugins for tools like 3DSMax and Maya, but also Blender can work with it. I think that it would be useful to have the ability to convert COLLADA … Continue reading COLLADA

Ever since starting the FsDeveloper.com website (or SceneryDesign.org as it was called before), I seem to have been the top poster on the site. And each time I think that I have now reached a huge amount of posts, that sound really like quite a lot. This for example happened when I got my 500th post, then with the 1000th, 2000th, etc. And just after my last post of today I noticed that I had reached the amount of 5555 posts today. I found this a nice looking number, worth of a little blog post. So let the post count … Continue reading 5555