Month: January 2009

The recent developments of Microsoft shutting down the ACES studio are making me a bit sad. Let me try to explain why. When FSX was released it included some great improvements over FS2004. I am talking from a scenery designer perspective of course, so I was most happy about the improved terrain engine, that allows more resultion that 4.8 meter on the photo scenery, a better autogen system and the improvements to the modelling SDK, which means that more things can be done without tweaking the code. In my job I am also working with visual simulations and I can … Continue reading Is this the end?

If you are on Facebook, consider joining this group that Francois Dumas has started to show your support of FS.

Over the night some more news on ACES has appeared, I’ll just post the interesting links here: http://www.futuregpu.org/2009/01/end-of-era-aces-studio-and-flight-sim.html http://pc.ign.com/articles/947/947737p1.html

Yesterday while driving home I heard on the news that Microsoft would be cutting jobs. But at that time the thought never came into my mind that the consequences of that would be as big as we learned today. While looking at some simulation related news at work today, I suddenly came across the message that the Microsoft job reduction would have big influences on the ACES studio, which makes Flight Simulator, as welll. After looking around the web for more information, things became more clear. Former ACES team members posted more information, like Steve Lacey on his blog or … Continue reading Microsoft closes ACES studio

Today I was testing ModelConverterX with the default Airbus A321 of FSX. When I wanted to export the object to a different format I noticed that the default name suggested by ModelConverterX was a bit weird. This was because the name stored in the MDL file was not really correct, I hope they are not offended in Toulouse…

Last May I gave a presentation about ESP and FSX at the DevDays in Amsterdam. Until now I never found out what they did with the video recording of that session, but today I found it back on the MSDN website. It is in Dutch, so unfortunately not everybody will be able to understand what I am saying.

Your first question might be why I would like to do this? There are multiple reason for that, but the main reason is that I was not so pleased with processing my big aerial imagery on Vista. It just doesn’t seem to work nicely when you are processing files of a few GB in size. So I decided to do the processing of my imagery on my other machine that is running Linux. After the processing was done I had the option to copy the resulting image file back to my Windows machine to make the BGL or I could … Continue reading FSX SDK on Linux

At bit off topic maybe, but recently I found out that my company (the Dutch Aerospace Laboratory – NLR), put some nice promotion videos on YouTube. So if you might want to see a bit of the things I am doing for work have a look. Especially this video gives a nice overview of some of the simulation facilities I am working with.

Although the functionality to automatically generate lower polygon models for the LOD is not finished yet, I still have to add functionality to preserve materials and mappings better, I have decided to move over to another big thing on my ModelConverterX todo list. The main reason for this is that I need that other functionality more at the moment for some objects I want to convert. What I am working on now is exporting of animations. In the preview it is already possible to show the animations of imported FSX MDL files, but it would be much more useful if … Continue reading Export of animations

Sometimes a small preview video says more than a long piece of text. So therefore I have a preview video of the ModelConverterX LOD Creator functionality for you. Enjoy!