16059

I haven’t posted much to this blog recently, because some other things kept me busy. Had a business trip for work, spend some time preparing for the Sinterklaas celebration tradition we have in the Netherlands, etc. But there has been quite some exiting news recently that I want to share with you all. Flight beta Microsoft has announced that the beta testing of Microsoft Flight will start next month. That’s interesting news, let’s hope it will be a good platform for addon developers again. The even better news is that you can apply now to be part of the beta testing. So … Continue reading Quite some news

So this weekend was the annual FSWeekend in the Netherlands again. Just like the last couple of years I was present again at the NL2000 and FSDeveloper booth. It is always amazing to see in how many ways people can enjoy their flight simulation hobby. It ranges from flying in clubs to building cockpits at home, making addons and much more. And this weekend is not only about Microsoft Flight Simulator, Falcon 4, X-Plane and FlightGear were also well represented again. The best part of the event is probably talking to all the visitors. After so much online contact, it … Continue reading FSWeekend wrap-up

We have opened two new sub-forums at FSDeveloper to discuss the development of aircraft and scenery for X-Plane. You can find the announcement for these new forums here.

I have added a new object reader to ModelConverterX, this time for the X-Plane OBJ format. From tomorrow this new reader will be available in the development release. I don’t have an extensive collection of test objects in the X-Plane format yet, so it might be not all commands are properly supported yet. But the reader should support the following features: Reading geometry Reading LODs Reading animations Most of the material/appearance attributes Aircraft specific elements, like cockpit regions are not supported at the moment, since these can not be exported by ModelConverterX to any other format. If you find some … Continue reading X-Plane OBJ reader

I usually keep a list of bugs and features that I want to work on first for ModelConverterX. This is sort of my roadmap to the next stable release. But as it goes with a hobby project like this, sometimes the fun things push you away from the planned roadmap. Let me give you an example. Last week I made a video tutorial about placing effects using ModelConverterX. In some of the discussion that evolved after this a user, I won’t say it was you Bill, mentioned that it would be cool to have the actual effect also displayed in … Continue reading How to deviate from your roadmap…

There has been some discussion recently on the FSDeveloper forum about creating a place to discuss X-Plane related topics as well. We have now created a poll to see how much interest there is to discuss addon creation for different simulators. Let us know what you think. It is a long time ago that I looked at X-Plane myself, but I have been able to compare MSFS development with creating scenery for professional flight simulators (those that airliners use for their training). There are more similarities than you might expect at first. So I am sure that between FSX, X-Plane, … Continue reading FSDeveloper & X-Plane?