Arno Gerretsen

ModelConverterX magic

The last few days I have been working hard on improving the ModelConverterX tool again. Some other members of the Netherlands 2000 Scenery Design team were busy trying to convert some of the old API macros in the project to new FSX MDL files, so they provided me with a fresh stream of bugs.

While testing one ship object I came to an interesting conclusions, illustrated by the screenshot below. In the screenshot you see the ship in ModelConverterX in the top left corner. On the right you see it twice in FSX. The ship at the back is the original API macro. It is obvious that FSX has trouble to display some of the features of this object. Apparantly this object uses some opcodes that are soo old that FSX no longer fully supports them. But the ship in the front is the same object, placed as a FSX MDL file after converting it with ModelConverterX. This looks a lot more like the ship it is supposed to be.

I found this a nice example to illustrate the benefit of converting your old objects to the FSX format. That is also the purpose I started making ModelConverterX for in the first place.

Some Wiki updates

I have added some additional information to the FSDeveloper Wiki.

• Update of the information on the FSX MDL format. This is mainly what I figured out while adding support for animations to ModelConverterX.
• Added an article to explain the different DXT compressions that can be used for textures. I would be happy to receive any feedback wether the information is understandable for a normal developer in the way I have written it.
• Added an article about the FSX AGN format. It is far from complete at the moment, but hopefully it provides a start for more information on this format to be collected.

Textures

Some time ago I came across the website CG Textures which has a huge collection of images that can be very useful when looking for a specific texture. I think this might be a useful website for scenery designers.

Replacing the object market

Before we had a forum called Object market at the FSDeveloper site where people could share their work with other developers. This forum has now closed and all objects from it have been added to the downloads section.

Of course users are still free (or I would even say encouraged) to contribute their work to the download section. Here you can find all instructions on how to do so.

New categories

I have added two categories to the FSDeveloper forum. One for autogen related questions and another one for Microsoft ESP specific discussions. The ESP forum is meant for things that are related to ESP only, if it is a design question that applies to FSX and ESP both please use the existing subforums for scenery and aircraft design. I have also tried to move all posts that should belong in these forums to them already.

Merry Christmas and Happy 2009

The last time I have been quite busy, so therefore there have not been any new posts on this blog recently. I have just come back from a short vacation in Belgium and am full of energy again to do some interesting FS related things in the remainder of my Christmas break. I plan to for a bit on the FSDeveloper forum and Wiki, work on the ModelConverterX tool and what else comes to mind. Probably I will have more plans than time, just like the years before...

Let me wish everybody a Merry Christmas and a happy 2009 already.