Arno Gerretsen

Announcing a new build

Just a quick note to let you know that the new Library Creator XML 2.0 build I talked about a few days ago, has been posted to the forums. Check out this thread from more information and to download the latest version.

Got a new bike!

I had been looking around for a new bike for weeks already and today I finally bought one. And to prevent some confusion right away, with bike I don't mean such a thing that has an engine, but a bicycle. Now that spring is coming around again, I am looking forward to take the bicycle to my work again. Hopefully the weather will be good enough already in two weeks time when my current monthly train ticket ends.

For those people from abroad where it might not be so common to use a bicycle, I tried to find some statistics. Here in the Netherlands we have around 18 million bicycle (for 16 million people), so I guess you can say that they are very common here. Giving the fact that the country is so flat, they are a perfect way to travel for short distances of course. Yearly about 14 billion kilometers are travelled by bicycle, so that is around 900 km per person per year.

Personally I guess I am helping to keep the figures up. Including my new bicycle I own three now for example. I have one racing bicycle I use to make trips with during the weekend (you know, the kind of bicycles they drive the Tour de France with as well). And I have two normal bicycles now, as I will keep my old one as a spare. I use these to go to work in the summer and most other local travel.

Also for the amount of kilometers I help to keep the statistics up a little bit. Last year I drove around 3000 km, which does not even include all short visits to the local shop, etc. Let's see if I can improve on that this year. Given the fact that from home to work is already 20 km, so 40 km a day, it should be possible to get a nice amount of kilometers again this year. Hopefully the weather will be fine this spring/summer/autumn, so that I can cycle to work often. At least I find it a very good method to combine a bit of sports with the travelling that I have to do to get to work anyway.

What will the new Library Creator XML 2.0 build bring?

This night I made some nice progress again on the next alpha build of Library Creator XML 2.0. I have mainly been focussing now on the features to make the tool more user friendly to use. So for example I have coded the part again that shows the 8 most recent library XML files that you opened. So that you can much faster reload them. Another item on my todo list is to detect changes being made. So that the user can be asked if he wants to save these changes when he quitst the tool without first saving his work.

In this next build I will also add the ability to export the Rwy12 XML files again, so that all functionality of the 1.0 version can now also be found in the 2.0 one. So maybe I can better call this next build a beta version, as it should be quite stable and functional by now. I expect the next build somewhere this weekend.

And I do promise that while you will be testing this next build, that I will start on writing a manual for this new version of Library Creator XML.
 

Are nice people born in March?

The forum software that we use at the FsDeveloper website has the option to automatically send a congratulation email to user that have their birthday at this day. Of course this only happens if the user has entered his day of birth. Sometimes I get a reply on these automatic messages, usually just a quick thanks. But in the last two days I got about 3 such replies, which is a lot more than usual. So this made me wonder, would people born in March be friendlier?

Library Creator XML 2.0, a new build

I have just uploaded a new build of Library Creator XML 2.0 alpha to the forums. In this latest build I have added back most of the functions that are available in the 1.0 version. Only the Rwy12 export is still missing, I will try to add that again in the next build.

But I have also added some completely new functionality. You can now drag and drop your MDL files onto the tool from Windows Explorer. This makes it even easier to add objects to your object library.

So check out this latest version and as soon as I have added all functionality back, I will also start to write a good manual.

Downloads also online again

After updating the software used in the download center, it is back online now. I have also adjusted the settings of the download center a bit, so hopefully that will prevent the problems with the high server load we had yesterday.

Website running again

The FsDeveloper website is online again, but I had to disable the download section for the moment. It was the script from the download section causing the server load. It seemed someone from China was calling this script very often. Until I have found a solution for this, the download section will remain offline. I will try to install the latest version of the download script tomorrow, to see if it helps.

FsDeveloper is currently down

The FsDeveloper website is currently down, as the webhost turned it off after a certain script used too much resources on the server. I am currently trying to figure out what is going wrong.

Some normal map tricks

I do promise this will be my last post about normal maps for today, as I finally got them to work as I wanted.

Due to the way MS has written their shaders, some special care is needed when constructing your normal map texture. If you just use the plugins that are made for it, the shading of your object will be wrong in FS. So take these steps to get the correct result:

1. First make sure you have a bump map for your texture
2. Convert it into a normal map with the plugin
3. Copy the content of the red channel to the alpha channel
4. Make the red channel black
5. Invert the green channel
6. Make the blue channel white

Now you can use your normal map, simple add it under the bump map slot of your material and save the DDS as DXT5. It is important to use DXT5 as it has an 8 bit alpha channel and also keeps the quality of the green channel quite good during compressing. So this will mean the compression does not hurt your bump map too much.

So it means a little work when making your normal map, but I can understand why MS made the shader like this. It ensures we can use compressed textures, without the quality of the bump map being reduced a lot.

Normal map plugin

Hope you are not yet fed up with all my posts about normal maps. The SDK advice us to use the Nvidia Normal Map plugin for PhotoShop to create our normal maps. For those using the GIMP I just found a plugin that offers the same functionality, but then for the GIMP. I just wanted to share that with you.

How normal maps work

For those of you that are trying to understand more about the normal mapping (or bump mapping as it is called in the gamepack) that can be used in FsX, have a look at this nice tutorial. It helped me a lot in understand more of the principles behind it.

At the moment I am still figuring out the last bits of how it works in FsX, but after that I hope I can write a little article about it.

Cool idea to create normal maps

As you might have seen in the forums, I have been playing with bump mapping for scenery objects lately. While I was searching the web for a little more information, that might solve my shading problem as mentioned in the forum, I can across a nice tutorial that shows how you could create a bump (or normal) map for an object. I find it a pretty cool idea, I only think it will not be very practical to light a building from multiple sides just to make your normal map.

Working with FwTools

I have added a new article to the Wiki that explains how you can use FwTools to create GeoTIFF files, which you can use for your photo scenery. There might be other tools to do such tricks, but I am familiar with FwTools as I use it at work. And besides that it is a open source project, which means it is free to use. So therefore I decided to make a little article about it.

The article describes how you can add positional information to an image and how you can reproject it to WGS84 if needed. Hopefully the article is useful to some of you and I will try to expand it with other useful information when I find some more.

Still alive

I know I have not posted that much lately on my blog, but I am still alive. Unfortunately I did not have that much time the last weeks to explore the nice things I want to post about, but that seems to be changing again now.

Last weekend I finished a new build of Library Creator XML 2.0, you can find it in the forums. This version still does not have all the features of version 1.0, but the features it is missing are less important for FsX anyway. You should think about feature like API macro export. I will try to add them back as soon as possible, so that version 2.0 can become the new stable version.

Besides that I have also found some more time to explore the new options of the GMax gamepack. I have been playing with using bump maps, details textures, reflections, etc. Once I have got a clear picture on how to use them, I will probably make a new article on the Wiki to tell you about my findings.

Now that I am talking about the Wiki, I do have another Wiki article in mind, it will be about creating GeoTIFF images for resample. I often see questions about this on forums and I think it would be useful to have a tutorial about this, as having a GeoTIFF images, makes creating your scenery so much easier.

So keep an eye on this blog, as I will post here once I have more interesting findings or once I have added one of those articles.