Month: December 2009

The last few days we were in Normandy, around Criel-sur-Mer. Just a few days away to relax a bit after a busy year and trying to think as little as possible about work or flight simulation. So when it was a nice and sunny day we decided to go for a walk along the coast and over the beautiful cliffs. And what do you think we stumbled upon during our walk? A nice little airstrip, on top of the cliff and quite close to the coast. I think the airstrip is used by a local flying club, probably with ultralights, … Continue reading Criel-sur-Mer

Just a little reminder that in two days there will be an online video tutorial about ModelConverterX. I think tutorial I will give a quick introduction to the tool and after that I will show how you can use it to convert old API macros into FSX MDL files or how to import them into GMax for further editing. So you are all invited to join this tutorial on Saturday 2nd of January at 20:00 CET on the FSDeveloper Livestream channel. See you there! And if you can’t make it the tutorial will be available on the Wiki afterwards as … Continue reading ModelConverterX video tutorial

I would like to wish everybody a Merry Christmas! Enjoy the coming holidays, I am sure I will. So don’t expect many tool updates in the next few days.

For today I made a little teaser video of gPoly to show the progress. As you can see the adding and editing of the polygons it getting there, so it seems I can move to the export functionality soon. Enjoy!

Time for another gPoly status update, today I have made some good progress on the tool again. The first part I have finished is the display of the GeoTIFF background image, this code seems to be quite optimal now, so that even with big images you can pan and zoom without too much delay. What I still have to do is verify the accuracy of the geo position, I think I need to render some reference information (of which I know the position) over it to do this. Another related feature on the todo list is the ability to make … Continue reading gPoly status update #4

Early January 2010 I will be doing two new online video tutorials, check out the details on the FSDeveloper website. Just like last time they will be given on the FSDeveloper LiveStream channel. And afterwards they will be made available on the FSDeveloper Wiki as well of course.

This evening I continued on the gPoly tool. The focus was again on the display of the background images, since they are a very important feature when drawing ground features or when checking if they are in the right location. I made some good progress and for small to medium sized airports it is working fine now. But when I try to load the high resolution background image I have of Schiphol things go less smooth, especially when you zoom in far and the highest resolution needs to be loaded. So there is still some work to be done when … Continue reading gPoly status update #3

Tonight I have added a nice little feature to ModelConverterX again (it will be in the 1.2 development release tomorrow). You might wonder what it is? You can now choose to render your object in day or night view. The night view allows you to preview the night textures. Here is a little screenshot of one of the default objects. It is not yet finished, since I just display the night texture now. Whether it is a nightmap or a lightmap is not yet taken into consideration. So that gives some room for future improvement. But this will allow you … Continue reading Day or night?

Just a quick note that a new stable version of ModelConverterX is available. If you have been using the development release lately there is not so much changed, but compared to the last stable release there are loads of improvements. I have also updated the user manual. For the coming time the development of ModelConverterX will be slowed down a bit, since I plan to focus more on the gPoly tool.

By default landclass is defined as grid data within FSX, so that means that for each area of roughly 1.2 x 1.2 kilometre you can define what kind of land usage it has. For some time already I wanted to test what effect landclass polygons would have on the looks of the terrain, so this morning I gave it a try. I had some land usage data for the Netherlands available, which gives the type of land usage as vector polygons. So I wrote a quite translation tool to map those values on FSX landclass GUIDs. Below is a screenshot … Continue reading A sunday morning experiment