Month: November 2008

I think it was more than a year ago. Nick asked me if I would make a tool and my answer was that it was not necesairy because the tweak only involved a few easy lines of ASM code. Yesterday I started making a tool for this simple tweak, plus some other features. What am I talking about? Ground polygons. If you look at the forums they remain a hot issue all the time. Having to use the FS2002 gamepack, having to tweak the ASM code by hand. So now I started working on a tool that I called GroundPolygonAssistent. … Continue reading The tool I should have made earlier

Over the weekend I have been continuing with the ModelConverterX tool again. A while ago I improved the FSX MDL importer so that it could read levels of details and animations, but at that moment I did not update the different exporters to handle these more advanced features as well. So now I decided it was a good moment to address these issues. I should mention right away that getting animations to work in the exporter is a step that I did not try to take yet, now I focussed on getting the static transformations and the levels of detail … Continue reading Why is the 3DS format giving me trouble?

Yesterday I visited the ESP Developers Conference in London and I must say that it was very interesting. Being active for a long time in the FS community already the overviews of the SDKs and the basics of extending ESP did not provide much new things to me. But especially for the panel and gauge side, which is not my area of expertise, I did learn some new and interesting stuff. But the main part that made the conference interesting was meeting the other people there. For example it was nice to meet Todd Landstad from ACES, after talking with … Continue reading Back from London

A little while ago I already wrote about the fact that I was working on my own texture loaders for the ModelConverterX tool. I have now finished the first versions of the loaders I find most important for the tool. I say first, as I am sure some bugs will be surfacing when they are used by more users. So I have now made loaders for the DDS, BMP and R8 format. The DDS format is common in FSX and I can now read DXT1, DXT3 and DXT5 variants. Figuring out what their difference on the binary level are was … Continue reading Reading of textures

While the flu kept me in my bed, it seems something else also affected the webserver of the FSDeveloper website. I just noticed it today when I sat behind my computer again and I have informed support about it. So hopefully the site will be running soon again. As this kind of problems seem to happen semi-regular we will already try to investigate the sources of it. But if you excuse me now, I will retreat from the PC back into the bed, as I am not fully recovered yet. EDIT: By now the site is up and running again.

Making ground polygons with GMax always seems to be a hot issue, especially the fact that you have to use the FS2002 gamepack and apply some tweaks to make things work. So this challenging part of scenery design gets discussed a lot on the forums. But now there is a new tutorial that might help you. In it Bill Womack explains how he made the runway for his Plum Island scenery. So have a look at this nice tutorial.

First, sorry for this rant, but at the moment I am just to annoyed by it. Since a few moments the public transport company of Amsterdam already decided to make it more difficult for me to get to work. They are renovating some stations, including the one I have to depart from. To make that work easier they decided to cancel half of the metros (including the one I have to take of course), forcing me to change metros at another station. That alone is something that I have to accept of course, but this week it seems they are … Continue reading Public transport

Loading the textures files into the ModelConverterX tool is something that has given me quite some challenges already. I have used different libraries for it already and all of them gave me some trouble. At the moment I am using the library by Martin Wright and although this one can read all the files I want, it is not a very fast library. So this makes the loading of models relatively slow. That is why I decided to have a look at how the different texture formats exactly work and see if I could create my own texture file loaders. … Continue reading Texture file formats

I am a bit late, so you might already have read this somewhere else. Microsoft is organising an ESP Developers Conference in both Orlando and London. For more details check the ESP blog. The one in London is at the 19th of November and I am tempted to go there myself as well. At the moment I am looking for affordable travelling options. So maybe I will see you there.