Month: February 2012

I have just added a new feature to the ModelConverterX development release. It is a MDL Tweaker that you can find in the special tools menu. Let me first explain how this tweaker differs from loading a MDL into ModelConverterX itself. When you import a MDL into ModelConverterX the object is read and stored in an internal representation. ModelConverterX then works with this internal representation when you make changes. In the end this internal representation is exported again to a MDL file. The MDL Tweaker works differently, it directly manipulates the binary code of the MDL file, without decoding it … Continue reading MDL Tweaker

A recent question by Don Grovestine on the FSDeveloper forum made me look more at the shadows of FSX models. As everybody knows, turning on the shadows in FSX can have a considerable influence on the performance. But the FSX MDL format also does allow you to specify a custom model that is used to render the shadow. I did some testing today to determine how big the performance difference can be. I started by making a rather complex object, with almost 6000 triangles. And I placed many instances of it at my favourite test location. The screenshot below shows how the … Continue reading Custom shadow model

I have just put the first version of the Animation Tweaker in the ModelConverterX development release. You will find it in the Wizards menu. This first version can do two things (or actually it does those two automatically to all files you process with it): Make FS2004 animations with more than 1024 frames Update the animation to use local variables As input to the wizard you should use FSX MDL files. I did test this new function with some test files here, but please let me know if you have issues with your files. It is a first beta, so … Continue reading First beta Animation Tweaker available

One of the first tool I made for scenery designers was the Conditional Animation Tool, CAT. The first version of this tool was released in 2003 and I mainly started making it because I grew tired of tweaking animations by hand (and I got tired of explaining people how to tweak them by hand). After the release of FSX, the development on CAT sort of stopped. The new native FSX format does not allow that kind of tweaking and for FS2004 the tool had most needed functionality already. But since then there is another kind of animation tweak that I … Continue reading The CAT is not dead