Month: October 2011

Some weeks ago I added a tool called agn2txt to the development release package of my tools. With this tool you can decompile AGN files to readable TXT files. Today I have added the reverse tool as well. As you might have guessed it is called txt2agn and it can be used to compile the TXT file form agn2txt back into an AGN file. So this allows you to make changes to the TXT file and then create an updated AGN file. The tool is a command line application again and it takes two arguments. The first is the TXT … Continue reading txt2agn

I made a mistake in my last blog post about our SketchUp presentation at FSWeekend. We will not be giving this presentation on both days, but only on the Saturday. On the Sunday there are some other interesting presentations. Below is the complete schedule of all presentations. Hope to see you there! Saturday 11:00 – 12:00 – Geert Rolf – Rebuilding a real Flight Simulator, an overview of 3 years work at the Norwegian DC-10 (in English)   13:00 – 14:00 – Joop Mak – The history and development of the NL2000 scenery (in Dutch)  15:00 – 16:00 – Arno Gerretsen and Francois … Continue reading FSWeekend presentations

Today I have extended the filtering options in scenProc. I have added some addition parameters and allowed different conditions. The new attributes are the length, width and area of the feature. These are calculated and added as attributes for each feature now. The new conditions mean that you can now also filter on attributes being not equal, greater or smaller than the given value. An example where I used such conditions is below. In that case I gave all buildings with a width below a certain value a peaked roof, while I gave all wider buildings a flat roof. With … Continue reading scenProc improved filtering

Yesterday I updated my Linux machine to the latest version of Ubuntu. One of the components that was updated along the way was Wine. So this morning I decided to try to start ModelConverterX using Wine. I had tried this before, but then it resulted in a crash as far as I remember, because one of the DLL files tried to access a Windows specific function. But, slightly to my surprise, ModelConverterX now ran fine. Below you see a screenshot of the tool in action on Ubuntu, loading a FSX MDL file. I think it is good news the tools … Continue reading ModelConverterX on Linux

This year I will be attending the yearly FSWeekend event at Lelystad again. Just like in previous years you will be able to find me at the NL2000 / FSDeveloper stand. This year I will be there together with Francois Dumas (from FSAddon and much more) and we will be showing you have much fun it is to make scenery with Google SketchUp. Every day we will give a presentation at 15:00 as well, where we will give you a crash-course to get started with SketchUp. So always wanted to add your own house to FS? Make sure to visit … Continue reading Learn about SketchUp at FSWeekend 2011

A few weeks ago I made a tool that can decompile AGN files and create a TXT file to show you which autogen is in there. I called this tool agn2txt. It is my plan to make a compiler as well for the reverse, so this would be called txt2agn. It can create an AGN file again from the TXT file with the information. Making this tool was very useful for me to learn more about the AGN format. But I did not look at the SDK properly, since the FSX SDK also comes with a tool called AgnDump. It … Continue reading Decompiling and compiling autogen

A first beta version of the scenProc tool is available for testing now. It is part of the development release package of my tools. The tool is a command line tool to create scenery from data you import. At the moment it can create autogen files from GIS vector data. In the future other scenery processing will probably be added as well. On the FSDeveloper Wiki you can find the manual of the tool as well, it explains the options you can specify in the configuration file. Let me know how you get along with processing your own data. If … Continue reading scenProc beta available

Since my last blog post about the autogen I have mainly been working on adding autogen buildings as well. This went quite well, I can now add the generic autogen buidlings as well as the row houses from my tool. There are still some issue that some of the buildings don’t get the right shape, that’s because in the autogen you don’t use the total footprint. I need to derive a orientation and size from the footprint information. But once those few issues are out, I think I can make the tool available to others for testing as well. Let me know if you … Continue reading Autogen from OSM (3)

Tonight I was able to fix the remaining bugs in my tool to generate the autogen forests from the OpenStreetMap data. One of them was that I didn’t know that in the AGN file all polygons need to be closed (first vertex the same as the last vertex). Below are some screenshots of how it looks in the Annotator tool and in FSX now. The photo scenery I use is the NL2000 scenery of the Netherlands. Now that the forests are working, I am going to move to the houses. Let’s see what I can do with the house footprints … Continue reading Autogen from OSM (2)

As I mentioned in my previous blog posts I am trying to create autogen from GIS vector data. For my first test case I am using the OpenStreetMap data of the Dutch island of Schiermonnikoog. Below you see a screenshot from the data, as well as a screenshot in the Annotator tool showing the autogen I have made. It isn’t perfect yet, but I am quite happy already with the first results from tonight. Some of the forests are still missing, so there are still a few bugs left in my tool. But on the other hand quite a big part … Continue reading Autogen from OSM