Month: June 2011

It is great to see that the ground polygon wizard in ModelConverterX is getting more popular. I added this functionality some time ago to ease the scenery design process and let people avoid the manual tweaking of ASM files (it seems most people don’t like to use text editor to tweak source code). So I am happy to see the usage of the tool is picking up now. How do I know this, you might wonder? Mainly by the amount of bugs that get reported. I tried to make the tool as robust as possible, but it seems end users … Continue reading Ground Polygon Wizard becoming more popular

For those developers using 3DS Max to make their aircraft or scenery models there is good news. A common question on the FSDeveloper forum is which version of 3DS Max can I use together with the FSX gamepack? The bad news in that case is that it does not work with the latest versions and you can’t legally buy the old versions that do work. But now the good news, an updated SDK for Prepar3D has been released. This SDK includes the tools to export from the more recent versions of 3DS Max. Since the Prepar3D MDL format is the … Continue reading New Prepar3D 3DS Max SDK

I have added a new function to ModelConverterX, an notification when a newer development release is available. When a newer release is available you will get a notifcation message as shown in the image below. If you click on the balloon you will be taken to the ModelConverterX webpage where you can review the latest changes and download the new release. If you don’t want this function you can also disable it in the options of course. There is only one catch to all this, you need to remember to get the latest version yourself to get these notifications in … Continue reading You’ve got an update!

I have made a few small changes to the Ground Polygon Wizard. These changes deal with the way you can filter out polygons from your object after loading. In the previous version there were two buttons for this. “Filter out non-ground polygons” would remove all polygons that were not on the ground, while “Lower polygons to ground level” would lower all horizontal polygons to the ground level. In the new version these two buttons are gone. But instead of them you will find two checkboxes directly under the box where you select the file to load. This means that you … Continue reading Ground Polygon Wizard change

Today I was “playing” a bit with a profiler on ModelConverterX. This gave some interesting insights in how often certain functions are called or how much time is spend in certain functions. One of the things I noticed was that while loading SCASM API macros the triangulation of the polygons took relatively a lot of time. So I decided to have a look at the code involved and found out that the calculations to determine if lines intersect were to blame for all this. So I have rewritten this logic now and that seems indeed to have increased the speed … Continue reading Better performance for line intersection calculations