Month: July 2012

In the last two days I have made scenProc a little more robust. Before any mistake in the configuration file would usually result in a crash of the entire tool. That has been changed now. The tool will now check if you provided the right amount of parameters and give a warning when that is not the case. Sometimes it will also check if the parameters provided are of the right type, but that is not yet supported for all available processing steps. Another change I have made is that the tool now has built-in help. If you enter scenproc … Continue reading Built-in help

I am going to spend some time on the scenProc tool again the coming weeks. It’s time to finish some of the features of that tool and make it even easier to make autogen. But of course there are some challenges left. One of the main challenges is that most FSX autogen must be rectangular. So for a group of houses as shown above that will work. It is not so hard to define a rectangle for each of them. Some have a small extension, but even if you ignore those the result will look quite good. For the buildings … Continue reading Some autogen thoughts

I have changed the main user interface of ModelConverterX a bit, actually it has gone back to some of the concepts that the tool used in 2008 already. I did remove the tabs that were used for the preview, event log and options. Instead of those tabs the options are now on a separate form, which can be opened with the Options button at the top toolbar. The preview and the event log are both shown at the main screen. There is a splitter in between, so you can change the size of the preview and event log as you wish. … Continue reading User interface change

user: He, your tool does not work. me: What do you mean? What are you trying to do and what goes wrong? user: When I import my object it crashes. You need to help me, I have to convert this object. me: What is the error message you get at the crash? Can you maybe send me the object to debug? user: Never mind, I fixed it already. OK, this is expurgated a little bit, but this is how a typical user interaction about a bug in one of my tools might go. Both for the user and for me it is … Continue reading Problem reporting

One of the main differences between FS2004 and FSX when it comes to rendering the earth, is that FS2004 assumes that the earth is locally flat while rendering the scene, while FSX uses the correct curvature of the earth as well. But this has some consequences for scenery designers. When you make ground polygons they are usually flat in the design tool, but putting them on the curve of the earth will mean that the ends will float in the sky. The ground polygon wizard of ModelConverterX does correct for this problem, by shaping your ground polygons to follow the curve … Continue reading Correcting for the FSX curved earth