Arno Gerretsen

FSWeekend 2009

arno — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 20:08:00 GMT

Time for a little update. This weekend was the annual FSWeekend in the Netherlands again, and I was present there on behalf of NL2000 and FSDeveloper. For NL2000 this was certainly not the first time we were there and it was a lot of fun to meet all those users of our scenery again. There are people you see almost every year at the weekend. For FSDeveloper it was the first time we were (a bit) visible at the event. Due to the more technical nature of the FSDeveloper community there was maybe a little less interest, but hopefully it helped some people to get starting in making some addons themselves.

Another interesting thing at the FSWeekend was that IVAO had organised a seminar about the future of Flight Simulation. At those sessions a panel discussed the consequences of the closure of ACES and what it meant for our hobby. The panel of 5 consisted of Jonckers (IVAO), Kenny Moens (IVAO), Mathijs Kok/Winfried Diekmann (Aerosoft), Francois Dumas (FSAddon and more) and me (NL2000/FSDeveloper). I guess this topic could deserve its own blog post later on, but in short the participants agreed that for the short term the consequences were mainly more stability and more time to develop nice addons. For the longer term the opinion varied more, but it is logical that you look differently at it when you try to make a living on FS addons. The fact that Aerosoft is considering to build their own simulator was also discussed of course and that sounds interesting indeed. I guess we'll see what the future brings, but the FSWeekend also showed that there are still many people enjoy flight simulation as a hobby.

So with the FSWeekend over now, it is time to move on to some other things again. Besides the busy work schedule and the normal family activities, I will try to focus on two things in the coming weeks. The first one is to finish the typical Dutch windmill objects for the NL2000 scenery. Since we got asked many times at the FSWeekend when the next release will be, it guess I should try to give this some priority. Because we can't release a Dutch scenery without such objects, we should keep up the myth that we all live in windmills and wear clogs. Oh and to come back to the question about the NL2000 v4 release (which I answered a dozen times this weekend), it will be released when it is ready and we can't promise a date yet. But we can see the end of the beta testing tunnel by now.

The other activity I want to put some focus on is the new gPoly tool I am planning. The idea has crystallized quite clear in my head by now, so I am looking forward to start the actual coding. I really think that a tool to make the creation of custom ground polygons a lot easier would be helpful to many developers. So hopefully I can report some progress on this soon.

FSDeveloper is open again

arno — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:33:00 GMT

We have been monitoring the server since yesterday and things seem to be stable again now. So we have decided to open FSDeveloper again. You can be sure we will keep an even closer look on the server performance during the next days and if you notice anything weird please let us know.

FSDeveloper is down - update

arno — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 21:17:00 GMT

At this moment the FSDeveloper server is running again,but not stable yet. So we keep the forum deactivated till at least tomorrow. Here is a little background on what happened.

At this moment we do not know exactly why the server failed, but we are suspecting a hardware issue might be part of it. That is also why we keep the forums offline until we are sure the server is working fine.

Since the last few days we did get some errors that the daily backups could not be completed. We were still looking into the source of this problem, but it might be related to what brought the entire site down in the end. The fact that the last backups had failed, also mean that we can not restore the most recent data. So probably all forum posts and wiki edits made after the 20th of October are lost.

We are just as annoyed by all of this, as you will be. We hope that by tomorrow we have more information about the health of the server, so that we can bring FSDeveloper back online as soon as possible.

FSDeveloper is down

arno — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 16:35:00 GMT

At the moment the FSDeveloper site is down. We hope to get it back as soon as we can.

FSDeveloper video tutorials

arno — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 09:54:00 GMT

This week I came across the Procaster application to stream you desktop to the internet and yesterday I used it to do a interactive video tutorial about GMax on the FSDeveloper channel at Livestream. There was a good audience of about a dozen people, especially when you keep in mind I only announced the event 2 days ahead.

I think the general impression was that the video and sound quality are good enough to do online tutorials. And with the build in chat option the people watching could ask me questions during the tutorial. Maybe have a voice chat would make that kind of interaction even easier, but on the other hand it might disturb the tutorial more. So in total I think it was quite successful and I am looking forward to do more such tutorials later on. If you still have suggestions or feedback, please let me know.

Yesterdays tutorial about making a simple object in GMax is now available through the FSDeveloper Wiki as well. I have also made available the GMax and texture files there for reference purposes.

On the Wiki I have also create a page to collect suggestions for new tutorials. I have put some of my ideas on there already, but would be even more interested in hearing which topics you would like to see covered in a video tutorial. So please add your suggestions there and hopefully we can cover that topic later in a video tutorial.

Revival of a tool

arno — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 18:58:00 GMT

Today I made a new version of a small tool I did some time ago. Actually I redesigned it completely from scratch using C# and .NET this time. The tool I am talking about is CompileHelper. This is a small tool to assist developers in compiling their source files. For many developers using command line compilers like BGLComp, BGLC or SCASM gives quite some trouble. This is mainly because they have not been designed to be used in the drag and drop fashion that is so popular nowadays.

On forum you often read that people get no BGL or MDL file from the compiler and that a little black window showed for a micro-second. That proves to be too short to read the useful information the compiler is throwing at the user. Often that information will tell you exactly why your BGL or MDL file could not be created.

A few years ago I made the first version of CompileHelper to ease this problem a bit. The tool allows you to drag and drop the source file on it, just like you would love to do with the compiler. CompileHelper then calls the compiler in the background, but captures all feedback. Then we the compiler is finished this feedback is presented to you. Besides that the tool will also determine which compiler you need.

So today I made a new version of this tool, because the problem is still as common as a few years ago. And the old version of CompileHelper did not support the FSX BGLComp directly. Therefore I decided it was time for a redesign. So if you want to get the new version, have a look here.

LOD Creator improvements

arno — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 11:29:00 GMT

The functionality in ModelConverterX to create lower level of detail versions of a model was running very slow for complex objects. I have not fixed that completely (yet), but I have made some changes to this functionality that should at least make it easier to work with. The calculation that simplifies the object is now running on a different thread, so that at least the rest of the tool should remain more responsive. I have also added a progress bar, so that you can see how far in the simplification process the tool is already. See the screenshot of the new dialog below.

As you might see there are some more changes. I have removed the 3D preview from the LOD Creator dialog. Instead the mean 3D preview is used now to display the result of the LOD Creator dialog. You can still select the LOD you want to see from the LOD Creator dialog though.

Optimizing the simplication code further, so that it will run faster is still on my todo list. But at the moment I am also busy with preparing for the new gPoly ground polygon tool. So I am not sure which one will get my attention first. Now that I am talking about the gPoly tool, I would still be happy to receive your input on what you would like to see in a tool for custom ground polygons.

A clear license for the Wiki content

arno — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 19:00:00 GMT

At the FSDeveloper community we are working on adding a clear license to the Wiki, so that it is clear what people can do with the content that is on there. Therefore we are proposing to use a Creative Commons license, please read all the details of the proposal on the forum.

3DS exporter improved

arno — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 09:20:00 GMT

I have just fixed some bugs in the 3DS exporter of ModelConverterX. The main issue solved is that complex objects often could not be imported into GMax. Without going into too much technical details, this was caused by some variables being stored as a short, allowing a maximum value of 65535. Some object parts had more triangles or vertices than this limit and that resulted in the error when importing. This has now be been fixed and those model parts will be split when exporting.

Another improvement I made to the 3DS exporter is that the night textures and bump textures are now also written to the material when exporting.

For future improvement of the 3DS exporter I still have the wish to add animations as well, but that is a little lower on the priority list at the moment. And another 3DS related wish is to have an importer for the 3DS format as well.

How do YOU like to work?

arno — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 07:46:00 GMT

As I posted before, I am planning for a new ground polygon tool. To get more clear how potential end users, yes that is YOU, would prefer to make ground polygons I have setup a poll at the FSDeveloper forum. So please let me know what your ideal way to add ground polygons to a scenery would be. That will help me in creating a tool that is easy to use. I hope to see your vote!

Unions

arno — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 17:28:00 GMT

You could say that recently unions have played a role in my life. First there has been my wedding one and a half week ago of course, forming a nice union between me and my wife. But that is not what I want to talk about in this blog post.

I have also been working on some code that allows me to do boolean operations between polygons. This functionality is something that will come in handy when I start working on my new ground polygon tool, It can for example be used to automatically slice the polygons into piece of no more than 100 meters, so that there are no problems with the curvation of the earth within FSX.

Below you see a screenshot of my test application, where I am testing out these boolean functions. The red polygon is polygon A and the green one is polygon B. The four small pictures below show in grey the union of A and B, the intersection of A and B, polygon A minus B and polygon B minus A respectively.

At first I looked around for some library that implements this functionality and although some exist, I still decided to code it myself in the end. The main reason for that was that I wanted to understand how the process works and that why learn a bit more from it (although it might not always be the easiest way). So in the end I used the algorithms described in Geometric tools for computer graphics and make my own implementation, building further onto for example the polygon class I had already made for ModelConverterX.

The boolean operations are not completely bug free yet, I have already found a few polygons that are not processed correctly. So there is still some more work to do and after that I will start with creating the tool for ground polygons that can make use of this logic. So I still have much more fun ahead...

Looking for input on a new ground polygon tool

arno — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 14:18:00 GMT

For a while I am thinking about a new tool that will help in the creation of ground polygons, for the moment this tool will have the working name of gPoly. I have now setup a forum at FSDeveloper to discuss the requirements for such a tool. So I would like to invite other developers to provide their inputs and thereby help in shaping this new tool. I for example would love to hear what you see as the biggest issues currently while making ground polygons for your scenery and how you would like a tool to ease the process for you. So let me know what you think...

ADE9X

arno — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 17:37:00 GMT

Yesterday Jon Masterson (scruffyduck for the FSDeveloper forum members) has released a new version of Airport Design Editor. The main new feature is that the tool now also support FS2004 airport XML files. I think it is good news that this program can now be used for FS2004 and FSX design. So I would advice everybody to try this new version.

Announcing a new "project"

arno — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 20:19:00 GMT

During the last weeks I did not write much on this blog. This was partly because of some travelling and also because of a new "project" I have been busy with. This project is not so compatible with FSX, or any other version of Flight Simulator. And where previous projects did not have a very clear end date, this one has. The name of this special project is Wedding 2009.

So until September of this year I will have less time to work on the different FS tools that are still in development. And it could be that I check the FSDeveloper website slightly less frequent as well. At least know you know why...

Up, down, up, down, up...

arno — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 20:40:00 GMT

Today and yesterday the FSDeveloper website had a little bit of downtime. We are working on solving these issues by optimizing the server. Besides that we have also been working on the backups and some other technical issues. Hopefully so much downtime won't happen again soon, but at least you can be sure we are onto it.

Object report

arno — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:26:00 GMT

I have added another new feature to ModelConverterX that was on my wishlist for a while already, this is the feature to generate a HTML report of the objects loaded. This can be good for reference or to know which files are used and should be included in your distribution. For more details see this forum post.

I am considering to generate such reports for all the default object libraries in FSX as well, that would be a good reference of the objects that are available. These could then be hosted on FSDeveloper.

Managed SimConnect Client SDK

arno — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 06:50:00 GMT

Tim Gregson (or Beatle) has released a beta version of a new managed SimConnect client SDK a few days ago, check out his blog for all the details. He has also posted some details about the usage in another post already. For those that are using SimConnect a lot in their applications I think this is an interesting development to follow. And a big thanks to Tim for releasing this work of course.

Material highlighting (and more)

arno — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:35:00 GMT

I have made some changes to ModelConverterX that should make it easier to tweak or analyze models. The changes are that some of the forms are no longer modal and that you can highlight the selected material in the preview. For all details, please see this forum post.

Attachpoints

arno — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:16:00 GMT

Today I have been working a bit more on ModelConverterX. More specific on reading attachpoints for FS2004 scenery MDL files (for FSX files it was working already). While doing so I also took at a look at attached library objects, since their code is relatively similar I was able to add support for that type of attachpoint as well. So now the FS2004 and FSX MDL readers can both read attached effects and library objects. I have also updated the Wiki pages describing the MDL format with the new information I learned.

In the remainder of this week I plan to work on some other open issues for ModelConverterX, including the FSDS FSC format importer and exporter.

Moving status #4

arno — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 20:48:00 GMT

Since a few days FSDeveloper is running on the new server now and this are going well. The new server seems to be faster than the old one for most users. Today we have made two additional changes:

We have updated the style used. On the forum I explain the reasons behind this change.
The download section has a new user interface, it is less fancy but probably more user friendly. Once again the details are on the forum.

With this the moving of the FSDeveloper website is almost down, the only item still on our list is to improve the frontpage a bit, as we currently have a simple static one (which is still in the old theme). We have some nice plans for that already, but I'll keep that a surprise for now...