Month: April 2010

It feels like it is a long time ago I wrote a status update about the gPoly tool. And now that I think about it, it is actually a long time ago. But this weekend I have done some work on the tool again. I have mainly focussed on two functionalities: Being able to save your gPoly project file to disk and afterwards loading it back again. This might be some functionality that sounds very basic, but until now I had not coded it. For my tests I just every time drew some polygons manually. I can now save this … Continue reading gPoly status update #7

A few weeks ago I introduced the Drawcall minimizer functionality of ModelConverterX. This function can pack the different textures used on your model into bigger texture sheets to reduce the amount of drawcalls. This will result in a better performance in FSX. One of the main drawbacks of the initial implementation was that only the diffuse textures of the model were packed. I have now finished the code that also packs subtextures, like night textures or bump textures. So that should make it easier to reduce the amount of drawcalls on models that have such textures. This updated functionality is … Continue reading Drawcall minimzer with night textures

The problems we had at FSDeveloper, which resulted in no emails being sent out by the forum software have been solved. So from now on the forum notifications and the confirmations for users that are registering are working again. Thanks for your patience while we were solving this problem and a big thanks to fellow administrator Lefteris for finding what the problem exactly was.

I guess everybody knows the abbreviation RTFM and of course we all read the fine manual when we are using a tool. But for ModelConverterX I usually only update the manual with every stable release and the recent survey showed that most of you are actually using the development release. So as a result of that I have started a discussion on the forum to find out how you use the manual now and how useful it is to you. I am looking forward to hearing your feedback!

Some time ago I started a survey to understand better how ModelConverterX is used. Thanks to everybody who provided their feedback, I have now collected the answers and made an overview of them. Luckily many of the answers are not too surprising, it seems in general the tool is being used as I had expected. And the features people are missing are those that I had on my wishlist already. And of course there are always some nice new ideas, so I will put those on my wishlist as well. I would like to put some more focus on two … Continue reading Tool in a mid-life crisis?

In the next development release of ModelConverterX you will find a first implementation of exporting animations to FS2004 scenery MDL files. This item was on the wishlist for quite some time already and I have now given implementing it a try. I am sure you will find some bugs in this first implementation. Some of my test objects still go wrong, but the majority works fine already. So if you find any trouble or have an object that does not yet work correctly, please let me know.

To be honest I don’t know how long this announcement is on the FSInsider website already, but it seems that MS has run out of copies of FSX. The good news is that they are making new copies, so FSX should be available again at the end of May. Since it is very important for the health of the FS community that the flight simulation platform can still be bought, I think this is good news. For developers there are still enough challenges to make even nicer addons, so let’s hope this keeps our community as active as usual for … Continue reading FSX temporarily sold out

While working on the drawcall minimizer functionality of ModelConverterX recently, I realized that I had to update the way I represent the textures internally in the tool. Try to add minimizer support for night textures and other subtexture types turned out to be must harder than it should be. So I have now changed this in the ModelConverterX design. But since textures are just an important part of an object, it turned out that I had to modify quite some code (or you could also say that I had broken quite a bit of code). So I am now taking … Continue reading Sometimes you have to break some things…

Recently tweaking the FSX.cfg file to get better performance and solve some display problems has been a hot topic in the FS community. And now it seems Lefteris has made a nice little tool to assist in this tweaking. So check out his blog post for more details about the tweaking and the tool.

For a little while we are having email troubles at the FSDeveloper website. This means that the forum software is not sending out notifications of new posts. But more annoying is that also new users registrations also don’t get the confirmation email. We are working hard on solving these issues. If you have registered recently and are still waiting for the confirmation email, please contact me and I will active your account manually. We hope to have everything working as before again soon.