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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?

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 made some updates to the RGB texture loader of ModelConverterX. The first one is a bug fix for textures that are not square and the second one is added support for RLE compression in the RGB textures. With this the most commonly used RGB textures should be read by ModelConverterX. For those not familiar with RGB textures, this is a texture format designed by SGI that is usually used for OpenFlight models. So with this expansion of the RGB texture loader it should be even easier to convert your OpenFlight models to FSX or Prepar3D. The mass texture … Continue reading RGB reader updated

I have a list of feature requests for ModelConverterX, some items on this list have a higher priority than others. But as it goes with priorities they sometimes suddenly change a bit. For example I was planning to finish the Ground Polygon Wizard first, by adding support for seasonal textures. But some activities at work meant that the OpenFlight reader, which was almost at the bottom of the list, suddenly got more priority. So this weekend I started to implement this new reader for ModelConverterX. At the moment I have the basics working, as you can see in the picture … Continue reading OpenFlight reader

Lockheed Martin has released a trailer for the upcoming Prepar3d release. It is interesting to see where the development of this continuation of ESP is going. Hopefully we will hear more about it soon!

Let me just repeat some of the ESP related news that Tim Gregson (Beatle) recently posted on his blog. ESP is now officially dead, MS has taken the ESP website offline. The SDK pages on the MSDN website are still there though. Tim also reported that he has left MS now and will be working as a consultant for Lockheed Martin on the Prepar3d program (which is what LM is doing with the ESP code they licensed). So good luck with the new job Tim and hopefully we will hear more about Prepar3d in the future.