Arno Gerretsen

Awesome

I would like to point your attention to cool OpenSource project this time, OSSIM. At work we make use of this tool to mosaic different aerial images for example. But it can do a lot other image manipulating related tasks as well, like color matches between different images or reprojecting images to a different projection. So have a look at this awesome tool.

While reading the manual of OSSIM, I noticed that it should also be able to do image tiling. This could be a useful feature when trying to make the tiles for a high resolution ground layout. But I haven't been able to get that feature working completely, I'll make a new post about this once I got it fully working.

Live Meeting

While chatting with Nick today, we were looking for an easy way to show each other what we were doing on screen. For example to describe a bug or explain how we would like a feature to be. In the end Nick came up with a Microsoft Office Live Meeting test session and I must say that it worked great. It is a really helpfull tool when discussing things online. Being able to see how other people use the tools you have designed is also very useful, as it might not always be the way you thought people would use it.

But we do also see other cool things that we can do with Live Meeting, for example have a sort of online interactive tutorial session, where scenery design tools or techniques can be demonstrated, while people watch and ask their questions directly. Have a look at this thread at the SceneryDesign.org forum for a poll about this idea and hopefully we can do some trials with this idea soon.

Tool updating time

It was last friday that I had a nice chat with Nick once again (had been some time ago) and in the process we came to talk about MDL Tweaker as well. It seemed that Nick had not seen the latest beta version of that tool yet, so while chatting Nick started to test this version a bit. Of course he was able to produce some new bugs and errors for me very soon, as well as a lot of good ideas on how to improve features or the interface.

All these new ideas and suggestions, formed a very good motivation for me to do some coding work on MDL Tweaker right away. So this weekend I have been busy with implementing stuff from my wishlist. Once I have the remaining issues ironed out, you can expect a new beta release.

The most noticeable changes I have made until now deal with the object preview. First I have been able to make the drawing of the preview a lot faster. So where the CPU was often the limiting factor on drawing complex objects before, it now no longer is. Another important change is that the way the textures are searched has been changed. This means that loading the object will no longer take ages if the textures can not be found. Besides these two things, I have made a lot of other small changes as well, but you will have to wait for the release to see a full list of changes.

So thanks Nick, such chat sessions are really useful for the development of any tool. It really helps me to keep the end user in mind as well, as my own point of view on how the tool should works is often slightly different from what a average scenery designer would prefer.

Vliehors

I am back, hopefully the leakage has been fixed now (I still have the new sealant beneath my fingernails). I can't say that I had much fun trying to fix the shower, now I know for sure that I am not really a do-it-yourselfer.

I can't say that I did not have fun at all this last week, as I visited the shooting range of the Dutch airforce on the island of Vlieland. It was really cool to visit the control tower there and see the aircraft and helicopters fly by really close. We had a great day there, see the two photos below.



We did not only visit the range to watch the aircraft of course, we are also going to model it in the NL2000 scenery. So we took some good photos and notes for that as well. After all the repairing of my shower, I am really looking forward to spend more time on scenery design again this week.

Fixing a shower

I haven't got much FS related to report at the moment, as almost all of my spare time is being spend on fixing my shower. Last week I noticed a little wet spot on the floor of my PC room and it turned out that the shower had slowly been leaking water into that room (which is next to the shower). As PCs don't like wet feet in general, my first priority is now to fix this of course. So at the moment I am fighting with the old sealant, in an attempt to remove it. Once that is done applying some new to fix the leaking problem should be easy. And then I can finally spend some more time on FS stuff again as well, until then don't expect me to be online very often.