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Sunday, June 29, 2008 2:26 PM

Normal map tutorial

It is quite a while ago already that I wrote on this blog about how to use normal maps on your FSX models. Today I finally found the time to put that information into a tutorial on the Wiki. I hope it makes the process of creating a normal map more clear...
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Wednesday, June 04, 2008 11:41 PM

Gate IK animation video tutorial

Do you remember that Nick has been talking for a long time already about a new video tutorial for FSX? One that shows how to make those nice new skin and bone IK animations for your gates? Adrian Woods made a really nice tutorial about that and Nick has...
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Friday, May 30, 2008 4:18 PM

A mention of the CAT

At the beginning of this week a colleague entered my office and told me that I had been mentioned in an article he read. I told him I had no idea what he was talking about. It appeared he had been reading the latest issue of PC Pilot and in their article...
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Saturday, April 19, 2008 11:14 AM

Packing stuff can be fun

Over the last days, I have been busy packing my stuff for the upcomming moving. Although that is a lot of work of course, and my house is full of boxes at the moment, it can also have a fun part. While sorting about all the stuff in my computer room I...
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Friday, March 07, 2008 12:08 PM

DrawCallMonitor

The fact that the amount of drawcalls used by your object has a big influence on its performance is becoming more and more known in the community. A while ago I wrote about the performance I gained when optimizing one of my objects. If this still sounds...
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Wednesday, January 16, 2008 10:30 PM

Blender

What will happen when GMax is no longer there is a favorite topic for discussion on forums for a while already now. One of the alternative modelling programs often mentioned is Blender . Personally I consider that a good alternative as it is open source...
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Saturday, January 05, 2008 8:21 AM

Are they listening?

Complaining about the SDKs has been a favourite thing to do among developers for years. With previous versions of FS we always had to wait for ages to get them and of course it never told us what we wanted to know for our project (how could MS forget...
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Friday, January 04, 2008 2:08 PM

Good old scanner

This week I have been cleaning my computer room a bit and I came across my old flatbed scanner. You know, such a thing that was used before we had digital cameras to get a photo onto the computer as a digital file. I think I bought this one about 10 years...
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Monday, December 24, 2007 9:45 AM

Bye bye ObPlacer XML, welcome WhisPlacer

With FSX MS shipped a tool that allows you to place objects (and design mission), the Object Placement Tool (OPT). But because the interface is not really easy to use, alternative placement tools have appear, as they also did in FS2004. For FS2004 you...
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Sunday, December 23, 2007 2:11 PM

Merry Christmas!

Christmas is almost there, so I would like to take this opertunity to wish you all a Merry Christmas. Of course I will spend the Christmas days with my family, but for the rest this time of year is a good opportunity to catch up with some of the things...
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Saturday, December 22, 2007 12:19 AM

Modelling and texturing for performance

Of course every designer has read the excellent blog posts by Adrian Woods on how to optimize your performance by now. If not I would say do so now: part 1 , part 2 , part 3 , part 4 So after having read that you know that polygons do not matter so much...
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Sunday, November 11, 2007 7:56 PM

Day 8: AvSim FanCon day 1

The 2nd and 3d day of the DevCon kept me quite busy, so I did not write a new blog posts about them. But I can tell you that those two days were great as well. Learned a lot and spoken to a lot of interesting people. Yesterday was the 1st day of the Avsim...
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Wednesday, October 10, 2007 9:18 PM

Geoids, projections, datum, what?

At work I came across this nice article that explains some basics of GIS data projections, datums, geoids, etc. Although the target audiance of it is more the oil industry, I think it would also be good reading for people making FsX terrain scenery and...
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Sunday, August 05, 2007 12:42 PM

Airport Facilitator X

Flight1 has released a new scenery design tool, Airport Facilitator X . I have not (yet) tried this new tool, but looking at the info and pictures they provide it seems to extend AFCAD. Of course it is always good to build on such a nice tool. The tools...
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Saturday, June 16, 2007 11:03 AM

Always those blurries

A topic that appears very often on the FsDeveloper is the appearance of blurries in FS, usually related to developers adding their new content when it starts to appear. Unfortunately this is not a problem that has a single simple solution to it, but Phil...
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Monday, June 11, 2007 9:44 PM

Replacement jetways

Since last week I have been playing with the new jetway feature of FsX, to see if I can get my own jetway model used in there. I still need to learn a little more about bones, skins and IK animations to get it all working on a proper jetway model, but...
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Sunday, June 10, 2007 12:28 PM

Preserve those geo tags

A while ago I wrote about using FwTools to create or manipulate GeoTIFF images for use with the resample tool. One common problem I did not mention right then is that the tags containing this geo information are not understood by every tool. If you for...
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Monday, May 28, 2007 8:28 AM

The curved earth

Ever since FsX has been released, there have been a lot of discussion about the display problems with the old style ground polygons that are used a lot in addon sceneries. In FsX they have added an additional curvation of the earth, but these older polygons...
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Saturday, April 28, 2007 9:10 AM

While I was away...

While I was away to Cologne this week to attend a exhibition for my work, it seems quite a few interesting things happened in the FS world. Here is a quick summary of all the things I seem to have missed: The software of the community server this blog...
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Saturday, March 17, 2007 6:44 PM

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...
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