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I have just released a new version of ModelConverterX. The big change in this new release is that the ground polygon wizard is now included. Before I will go into the details of how to use this wizard, let’s first take a look at the problems it is trying to solve. When creating ground polygons scenery designers usually encounter these problems:   You need the FS2002 gamepack, since that is still the preferred way to create ground polygons. Some of the files of the gamepack are only on the FS2002 Pro disks, which means you have to find all kind of work … Continue reading Ground Polygon Wizard available

I have made some updates to ModelConverterX today. These are the main changes: Fixed some issues with exporting animations to the FSX MDL format. Sometimes some animations were missing after exporting, this should be solved now. Improved the part of the MDL reader that reads the custom variables used in aircraft MDL files. These should now be read better and I have also expended the list of known variables, so that more of them should have a meaningful name now. Only for old FS98 MDL files the names seem not correct yet, I will work on that. Fixed a bug … Continue reading Some ModelConverterX updates

Over the last days I have made good progress again with reading aircraft MDL files. I should directly say that not all of them will import correctly at this moment, but more and more are working. And also setting the conditions to extract a landing gear or set the flaps is working much better now. I will keep debugging the aircraft that do not yet work correctly, but this functionality is almost useful now. It can for example be used to make static aircraft out of old flyable aircraft, a task that is currently usually done using the great tool … Continue reading Update on reading aircraft MDL files

From tomorrow the development release of ModelConverterX is able to handle objects with conditions better. When importing objects that have conditions applied you will get the form as shown below. In this form you can specify the value you want each of the variables to have. Using these values the conditions will then be evaluated and the object is imported with these conditions applied. So for example when reading an aircraft MDL you can use this is import it with the landing gear extended or retracted. At the moment the form is still a bit technical, with all those numbers. But … Continue reading Object conditions

The screenshot above shows some success with reading the older aircraft MDL files. In this case it is a CFS2 aircraft (they use the same MDL structure as FS98 and FS2000). This models comes out quite good. Unfortunately not all models load that well. Many of them only show partly or not at all after importing. This seems to be caused by the fact that aircraft MDL files have a lot more conditional display than the scenery objects that ModelConverterX normally reads. So I will first have to think of a best way to handle these conditions, else it is … Continue reading Reading older aircraft MDL files (at least partly)

Just a quick update on this ModelConverterX functionality. It is not finished yet, but I have made some progress last week. I can now read the information from the files, but when testing with some aircraft MDL files I still encounter a lot of BGL opcodes that ModelConverterX does not recognise yet. So I am working on adding those before I put this functionality in the development release. Last four days we were away camping in Luxembourg, so I hope to continue programming on it later this week.

This Monday I already blogged about the new feature for ModelConverterX that allows it to read the old section 9 BGL files. This is the kind of files that tools like FSSC, Airport for Windows or GroundMaker make. I have now finished this reader and it will be available in the development release from tomorrow. Since Monday I have added support for many additional BGL opcodes, so that most of your BGL files should work fine now. I have used some scenery I made more than 5 years ago for FS2002 (or was it FS2000) to test this function and … Continue reading Reading section 9 BGL files

ModelConverterX could already read FS2004 and FSX library BGL files, but using the recent improvements I made for the aircraft MDL reader, I have now added another function that was on my todo list for quite some time. I have added support for reading older section 9 SCASM BGL files. This includes the scenery BGL files made with the FS2002 GMax gamepack, but also the older BGL files made by tools like Airport for Windows, FSSC or GroundMaker. It should now be possible to read objects from such files as well. Not all of the files I tested until now … Continue reading Reading non library BGL files