Author: arnogerretsen

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

Remember the limitation in the FS2004 GMax for the length of animations? The tool does not allow us to export animations longer than 1024 frames. This is quite annoying, since that limits your animation length to only 55 seconds. Luckily the FSX gamepack does not have that limitation. I have written down how to tweak the ASM code to get longer animations. But I’ll be honest, it’s quite complex code and you need to know quite a lot about how the animation code works to make the tweaks. So I can understand that it is not so appealing to many … Continue reading Longer FS2004 animations

I am working on a ModelConverterX update that will include better support for the placement of objects. One thing that will change is that placement information will be read from BGL files. But I am also changing the functionality in ModelConverterX that allows you to place objects. One of the main changes there is that you will be able to place multiple instances of the object, instead of only one at the moment. The screenshot below shows the new object placement form that I am working on. It will still take some time though before this functionality will be in … Continue reading Places multiple instances

It for sure was an interesting week with the new announcements Microsoft made about Flight. Will it end all the rumours that have been going around for a long time already? Let’s see. The new announcement makes a lot of things more clear. Flight will have an integrated addon market and it is focussed around Hawaii. So those rumours were correct. The fact that it is free is something new. You will get 2 planes and one island of Hawaii for free. If you want more planes or more regions to fly in you can buy them in the market … Continue reading Ending the rumours?

Last week I finished the model of the new railroad bridge near Zwolle for the NL2000 scenery. It was the first bridge model I made with SketchUp and it was an interesting experience. As most modelling tools SketchUp provides a lot of operators and I had not used all of them in my previous objects. One of the tools I have learned to appreciate more with this bridge is the follow me tool. As you can see in the screenshot below the bridge is partly curved and there is also a small side road (of course a bicycle path here in … Continue reading Follow me

I would like to wish everybody a happy 2012! Let’s hope this is going to be an interesting year again for FS addon developers. I think the signs are quite good, with Microsoft Flight around the horizon and X-Plane 10 as a promising platform as well. Let’s see where that all goes during this year. As usual I am also full of ideas for my own tools. I hope to continue the experimentation with scenProc and autogen for example. And also for ModelConverterX there are loads of ideas left on my wishlist and I would like to release a new … Continue reading Happy 2012!

Christmas is approaching quickly, so I would like to wish everybody a merry Christmas. I hope you’ll have a great time. We’ll be visiting some family, so no FS development for the next couple of days.

While working on the next update of the NL2000 scenery, I have learned some interesting things again. For this update I have worked on the road bridges we have in the scenery. These objects have been in the scenery a couple of versions already, but with the road traffic that FSX has added it became quite clear that the cars were not driving over the bridge, but through it. The solution for this was to add a platform to the road surface of the bridge. Adding the platform was easy, that could be done with ModelConverterX in a few seconds. … Continue reading It’s the scale, stupid

I have just made a small update to the DrawCallMonitor tool. The change is that the user interface now has a status bar that will show you some additional information. The two main things are does this object have drawcall batching and does it have working levels of details. These two are related, but with this update you can quickly see how your object will perform. If the levels of details will not work, the text is red, if they will the text is green. Similar for the drawcall batching.