Arno Gerretsen

Welcome to the club Jon

We have another FS MVP. Jon Masterson, better know as scruffyduck on the forums, has been awarded the MVP award. Most of you will probably know him from his activity on different FS forums, including FSDeveloper, and from the ADE tool he is working on. Congratulations on the award Jon and keep up the good work!

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. Or else feel free to enhance the tutorial even more.

And of course, don't get carried away with applying normal maps. Only use them where really needed, as using them on all your models might not do the performance much good.

Back home again

Today I got back home after a week of vacation in France. We have been camping in the Alsace and Lorraine region. Although the weather was not perfect all the time, it is always nice to be out for a while. So now I am going to catch up with the email and the forum. 

Heading for France

Tent ... check, sleepingbag ... check, cooking equipment ... check, pans ... check, ....

 As you can see everything is ready to go on vacation now. Only have to put it in the car and then we'll head in the direction of France to go camping for a week. So no internet for the next week and thus no forum and no emails. So see you in a week and I am sure there will be enough questions waiting for me by then.

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 got it edited now. From now it is online at the FSDeveloper site, see all the details in Nick's post here. Let's hope we see more addon scenery from now on which these cool animated gates.

ModelConverterX manual

ModelConverterX update avaible

Today I handed in the key of my old house, so the moving "project" is now really finished. The last days I already had some more time to do some programming on my FS tools again, so as a result of that I have also been able to release a new version of ModelConverterX.

On the forum you can read all the changes in this new version, but the biggest new feature has to be the 3DS export capability. That opens new possibilities again to bring your old objects to life again in FSX. I think the next challenge I am going to tackle is making LOD models with the tool and writing them out as well.

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 about the realism of scenery for Flight Simulator they had an interview with the developer of the London Heathrow X scenery. When talking about the tools used they mention:

 "Besides the 3D modelling programme, you need a lot of other FS-related software for the AI-traffic (AFCAD), tweaked animations (CAT of Arno Gerretsen) etc and some code writing/tweaking"

It it really nice to see my CAT tool being mentioned in such an article and let's hope some of the tweaks mentioned also come from the FSDeveloper Wiki. I started to develop the CAT tool when I got a little bit tired from explaining agian and again to other developers how to make the ASM tweaks to get conditional animations. And by now it seems the tool is widely used by developers who want to get the most out of their animations. Let's hope the next version of FS will offer this kind of control over the animations out of the box.

ESP at DevDays

Tomorrow and on Friday I will be giving a presentation at the Dutch Microsoft DevDays titled "Flight Simulator
Secrets Exposed: The Microsoft ESP Visual Simulation Platform". I must admit the titles comes from a presentation by Todd Landstad of the ACES team that I luckily could make use of when preparing. Originally it was planned that somebody from ACES would be giving the presentation, but I am happy to replace them as a local FS MVP.

The presentations will give some background information about ESP and the Flight Simulator history where it comes from. After that I will get into the details (the secrets) that make Flight Simulator (and thus also ESP) such a fascinating product. I will also talk a bit about cases that show how the products can be used for professional (non-entertainment) uses.

So if you happen to be at the DevDays, speak Dutch (sorry it is in Dutch) and want to know more I hope to see you. Below you will find the times of my presentations. I don't think it is very interesting to attend both though, as I will reuse most of the material, only the focus will be a bit different depending on the audience.

Thursday 22 May: Geek Night  18:15 - 19:15
Friday 23 May: Academic Day: 13:30 - 14:40

ModelConverterX 3DS exporter

Now that everything is settled a bit again in the new house, I finally found some time again to do some programming. So the last evening I tried to continue on the 3DS exporter for ModelConverterX, that I had been working on before the moving. And the good news is that I was able to fix the last remaining bugs in it. So the basic exporter functionality is working  now. See the screenshot below for the museum API that I use often to test ModelConverterX, here it has been exported as 3DS and then loaded into GMax.

Currently the exporter only deals with the geometry, so no animations or advanced features like that are written (besides from the fact that ModelConverterX can not even read these features yet, the exporter does also not support them at the moment). An exporter like this opens a whole new world of reuse of your old scenery objects, like API macros.

But there is also one possible problem with it, it does allow people to import and edit work that is not their own. In general developers do not like that, so I think I will have to consider how to release this functionality in such a way it is useful, but restricts people from doing "bad" things with. If anybody has an idea about that, please let me know as well.

Sign of life

Logging off

DevDays

ESP Developer Center

The MSDN Developer Center for ESP has gone live. This is another great source of ESP information, besides the blog and forum mentioned before already. And as you can see they also feature the FS (or should I say ACES) MVPs there. This time it is my turn. Maybe good looking Nick will be next.

Some more ESP news

Here is some more exiting ESP news.

• The ESP team now has its own blog as well, so be sure to check it out.
• You can find some ESP code samples on the MSDN Code Gallery, just search for ESP over there. That should provide you with a starting point when exploring ESP further.

ESP forum

FSDeveloper down?

FSDeveloper seems down at the moment. But I am still at work at the moment, so I can not investigate things further. Once I get home I will take a further look.

UPDATE: The site is running again now in the evening. Sorry for this little inconvenience.

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 came across some old notes about scenery design. For example drawings I made for buildings that I wanted to model. I used these to make my objects in VOD or later FSDS (or hand code them in SCASM as I also did often). It was quite nice to find back all these old things.

After the moving I think I will try to scan some of that material, so I can put it here on the blog or write some article about it. I think it is nice to document how some things in scenery design have changed (and some things made not have changed at all).

But that is for after the moving, now I have to run out again and go look for some new furniture and continue packing stuff.

On the move

At the beginning of next month I am going to move to another house. So that means in the comming weeks I will have to start packing already and of course there are also a lot of other things to arrange. So this probably means I have a little less time to spend on FS during this period. I want to try to finish the ModelConverterX release I am working on now (with the 3DS export option), but after that the programming will probably go to a little lower level. Of course I will try to keep an eye on the forum during that period, but maybe also a little less frequent. 

FSX and CIGI

Some weeks ago I wrote about some code I wrote to control FSX using the CIGI interface with SimConnect. This week we finally had the time at work to test if the code actually works. So we loaded FSX, started our simulation host and tried it. After some configuration issues it worked very well. FSX proved to be a beautiful visual to be used with our simulation. And using SimConnect I could easily control the eyepoint of the own aircraft and all the other traffic flying around.

Of course there are still other things to add, like control of the weather or the time of day. And now we have to put FSX in slew or pause mode, as else the eyepoint is jumping a bit. But that basic works, so I am sure we can build further upon this.