14152

I have made a few small changes to the Ground Polygon Wizard. These changes deal with the way you can filter out polygons from your object after loading. In the previous version there were two buttons for this. “Filter out non-ground polygons” would remove all polygons that were not on the ground, while “Lower polygons to ground level” would lower all horizontal polygons to the ground level. In the new version these two buttons are gone. But instead of them you will find two checkboxes directly under the box where you select the file to load. This means that you … Continue reading Ground Polygon Wizard change

About a week ago I already wrote about the new functionality I was working on for the ModelConverterX Ground Polygon Wizard. Now I have finished it and from tomorrow it is available in the development release. Since there is no manual for this tool yet, let me explain how to add night textures or seasonal textures to your ground polygons while converting. Most of the process has not changed. So you still select the file you want to import. The gridview in the middle will then show all materials found in your object. In this view you will see two … Continue reading Seasonal textures in the Ground Polygon Wizard

In the last few days I have been working on the last missing feature of the Ground Polygon Wizard of ModelConverterX, the option to add night and seasonal textures from the wizard. This work is not completely done yet, but the part that generates the actual code is done. I just need to finish the graphical user interface and do some more testing. So hopefully I can release this feature in a couple of days. On the right is a small preview of how the user interface will probably look. For each material you can specify with a checkbox if … Continue reading Ground Polygon Wizard: night and seasons

Just before my vacation I already posted about the ground polygons wizard for ModelConverterX. Since then I have been working more on this feature and it is almost ready for inclusion in the development release. This wizard allows you to export your ground polygons without the FS2002 GMax gamepack, ModelConverterX will take care of converting them to the right format to behave as proper ground polygons. At the moment I am doing the last testing and removing some minor bugs. Parallel to this I am also enhancing the output of the ground polygons wizard to prevent suppression of autogen by … Continue reading Ground polygons and autogen

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

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

Today I made some improvements to the aircraft MDL reader of ModelConverterX. It still can’t read all MDL files, but much more of them should work now. This should at least give you an idea of the geometry of these models. The picture above shows an AI 737-300. Now that the geometry seems OK, the thing that bugged me most was the textures not showing. This is because for aircraft MDL files you can’t just take the main texture folder, they often have different folders for different liveries. So I decided to add support for that as well. At the … Continue reading Aircraft liveries