Month: December 2007

Today I made some nice progress again on the ModelConverterX tool. One of the new features I added is the option to scale your object, so that you can get the desired default size when placing your object with the XML code. Below you see a screenshot of the scale dialog. On the right you also see the toolbar with options that can be applied to the object.   There are still some bugs in the batch conversion functionality left, but once these have been solved I will upload a new version for you to play with.

Today I was looking around on the web for some icons to use in the ModelConverterX tool. Of course there are a lot of places where you can buy very expensive icons to use in your application, but that was not really what I was looking for. In the end I came across the Tango Desktop Project, a project with the aim to help create a consistent graphical user interface experience for free and Open Source software. They have a nice set of icons and I think you will see some of them appear in my tools in the future.

I can remove the first item from my “what I would like to do during the Christmas vacation” list. Today I finished the OpenFlight exporter functionality of the ModelConverterX tool. With this functionality it is possible to save the loaded objects in the OpenFlight format that is often used in image generators of professional flight simulators. The object shown in the picture below is an old API macro of a museum that I exported to OpenFlight and then loaded into OpenSceneGraph to visualize it.   The exporter is not yet perfect of course, it only supports static objects at the … Continue reading OpenFlight exporter for ModelConverterX

You might have noticed that over the last days I changed the theme a few times. Yesterday I thought I had found the one I liked most (the white one), but today I found out that it does not list the links to the ohers blogs. So I switch back to another theme again. But don’t worry, I don’t plan to keep switching daily. Or maybe I should try to make my own FSDeveloper style theme once…

With FSX MS shipped a tool that allows you to place objects (and design mission), the Object Placement Tool (OPT). But because the interface is not really easy to use, alternative placement tools have appear, as they also did in FS2004. For FS2004 you had for example Rwy12, EZ-Scenery or ObPlacer XML. Now for FSX we also have Whisplacer or Instant Scenery. Some of these tools are freeware, other are payware, and also the features they contain can differ a bit. For a while I have been planning to make an updated and improved version of ObPlacer XML for FSX. … Continue reading Bye bye ObPlacer XML, welcome WhisPlacer

Christmas is almost there, so I would like to take this opertunity to wish you all a Merry Christmas. Of course I will spend the Christmas days with my family, but for the rest this time of year is a good opportunity to catch up with some of the things I want to do for a long time already. So those two weeks without having to go to work are already quite full with plans for things to do. I guess the best thing I could wish from Santa Claus (apart from the fact we already celebrated Sinterklaas, so no … Continue reading Merry Christmas!

Of course every designer has read the excellent blog posts by Adrian Woods on how to optimize your performance by now. If not I would say do so now: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4 So after having read that you know that polygons do not matter so much, it is the amount of texture vertices that the graphical card has to draw that matters. And also the amount of drawcalls is very important, so we need to minimize them. That means putting all your textures on one sheet if possible and don’t change the shader parameters (material … Continue reading Modelling and texturing for performance

You might already have read this on his blog, but Jason Waskey is leaving the ACES team (and MS as well). This happens more often of course, so why do I blog about it this time? That is because Jason was the first ACES team member that I ever had contact with. A few years ago now, I suddenly got a PM at a forum if I was interested to betatest FS2004. This PM was send by Jason and of course you can understand that I was very happy with this offer at that time. So Jason, good look with … Continue reading Jason leaves ACES

It has been much too long ago that I wrote about the ModelConverterX tool. Or actually it was also much too long ago that I programmed on the tool. But since last week I have been making some progress again. That is partly because I have a little more time now that all the travelling for work (and for vacation) has finished. And also because I need to tool for a little test case I am working on. For that test case I am trying to convert all the 3D API objects of an old scenery into the FSX MDL … Continue reading (Finally) another ModelConverterX update

The SDK update for FSX SP2 is now also available. So if you are a developers make sure to install this one as well and you are ready to go with SP2!