Arno Gerretsen

ObPlacer XML and Rwy12 object libraries

After the release of EZ-Scenery, I have made a few posts on this blog about the object library mania that occured back then. As people tried to convert Rwy12 library into EZ-Scenery libraries, while they are actually almost the same (only the way the information about the library is read into the tool is different). In principle any object library made with the Fs2004 XML scenery format, should work fine with any of the object placement tools made for this XML format.

So, how about ObPlacer XML you might be thinking. That tool uses a different way to read the information about the library. While EZ-Scenery reads the information directly from the binary BGL file, Rwy12 uses its own XML format to store the information about names, GUIDs, etc. And ObPlacer XML reads the BGLComp XML files that you can also use to compile the library BGL. All those different formats can become rather confusing to the new users.

But I have now added a new feature to ObPlacer XML to make the life of the designer a little easier. ObPlacer XML can now also read the Rwy12 XML format, so that means you can now add libraries that have been released for Rwy12 easier to ObPlacer XML as well. So you know have the choice to either load a BGLComp XML file or a Rwy12 XML file to let ObPlacer XML now about the object library.

There are a few things I still need to finish, but I will try to release this new version within the coming days. And yes, I have also fixed the bug about the mixed up texture coordinates in the generic building preview.

A slow MDL Tweaker

About a week ago I received a message on the forum that MDL Tweaker crashed on a certain object. After the designer of the object send me his MDL file, I soon figured out why it crashed. This was simply the most complex object I had ever tried to load into MDL Tweaker and a few integers had an overflow because the object had more than 32768 vertices. This was not that hard to fix of course, I just had to make sure that these big integers were read correctly.

But after I had fixed the errors, MDL Tweaker did not behave as before. It was now possible to load the object, but it took a very long time to do so. I thought I had tried to load quite complex objects before, but this one was of a different order (the MDL file is over 1 MB in size). After I while I found out that the internal way I store the MDL object (using collections to store lists of vertices, BGL commands, etc) is not very efficient when these lists grow very long.

This weekend I was visiting my parents. Being away from the internet, that also meant that I could work quitely on an improved version of MDL Tweaker (the train journey also proved to be a good place to work). So I have now tried to make the preview as fast as possible and to prevent people from thinking the tool is no longer responding, I also added a screen that shows the loading progress while you open a MDL file. For a complex object, like the one I described above, the loading can still take a few minutes. But I don't know if I can find an easy solution for that problem.

I have tried to put most code that takes a lot of time together when you first load the object. So that once it is loaded, the tool works as fast as possible. But unfortunately this is not possible everywhere. Some forms need to collect some information about the object when they are loaded and iterating through the object in memory takes some time on big objects. So in those cases you will have to be patient and don't think the tool has crashed.

I have now almost finished a new version of MDL Tweaker, so it will be released in a few days. Besides fixing the crash I mentioned and improving the loading of the object, there are some other small improvements. For example you can now select vertices in the vertex list based on the texture applied to them. So this makes it easier to select all vertices that belong to your trees for example (so that you can unify there normals).

Running a forum

I have been running the SceneryDesign.org forums for about 3 years now and I must say that a lot has changed over these years. When I started the site, I was looking for a place to store the tips and tricks I had on my personal homepage. And I added the forum to see if a place to discuss scenery design related topics would be useful as well. By now I think we can say that the forum has been found useful by the visitors. There is a base of regular visitors and a lot of designers know to find the forum with their design problems.

But unfortunately this popularity of the site also seems to have a downside. Lately I am getting a lot of fake registrations from people (or I guess it are actually bots, as they all select the first country in the list when registering, with happens to be Afganistan) using emails addresses that do not exist. Luckily this only generate some emails with errors for me and now and then I do clean those accounts that never get activated.

But the last few days it seems some of them actually take the effort to activate their account properly and start posting spam on the forums. These spam posts only happened in the News forum until now and that forum us moderated, so that prevents them from being visible right away. Hopefully the spam with not spread into the other subforums.

I guess the future will learn if this problems keeps increasing or dies again. Until now it is manageable or else I might have to look for some extra moderators to help in cleaning the forums.

Of course trouble like this never take away the fun of running the forums. All the interesting discussions going on are a good source of inspiration for new ideas and techniques. And of course helping a new scenery designer to find his way into this great hobby is also a nice thing to do.

Back home

I am back home and had a great vacation on Corsica. It is a really nice island to cycle around (although we only saw the northern part of it), with a lot of nice hills and mountains to climb. And every time a fantastic view on the landscape and the sea.

So now that I am back I am trying to catch up with everything I missed. An interesting FsX demo seems to be one of those things.