Arno Gerretsen : General

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.

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...

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...

AVSIM

arno — Sun, 17 May 2009 16:00:00 GMT

I am sure this is old news to almost everybody already, but still it is too important to not mention it. When I came back from Brussels and opened my mailbox yesterday I read the shocking news that the Avsim website has been hacked and is completely gone for the moment. Here is the official press release:

AVSIM Hacked

Tom Allensworth, CEO and Publisher of AVSIM, today issued the following announcement; "We regret to inform the flight simulation community that on Tuesday, May 12, AVSIM was hacked and effectively destroyed. The method of the hack makes recovery difficult, if not impossible, to recover from. Both servers, that is the library / email and web site / forum servers were attacked. AVSIM is totally offline at this time and we expect to be so for some time to come. We are not able to predict when we will be back online, if we can come back at all. We will post more news as we are able to in the coming days and weeks.

There is a temporarily forum already where you can get the latest news about AVSIM. Hopefully we will see this great website online again soon. I have good memories to their scenery design forum, were we used to have detailed discussions in the days of FS2002 to figure out how the engine worked and how we could optimize our scenery.

Heading for Brussels

arno — Sun, 10 May 2009 19:56:00 GMT

Tomorrow I am going to Brussels for my work, as we are attending the ITEC there. This means that during the next days I won't be behind my computer. Over the weekend I have been working a bit on the FS2004 MDL reader for ModelConverterX, but I am afraid it is still a bit buggy. I had hoped to iron out more bugs by now. Some of the default FS2004 library BGL files will still crash the tool. This is mainly related to reading the transformation and animations from the files. Once I am back I will continue working on this aspect, I feel I am almost there to implement it correctly.

International Flight Simulation Consortium

arno — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 18:16:00 GMT

You might have read about the International Flight Simulation Consortium on the internet already, for example at Avsim or Francois Dumas' blog. I don't so much to add to what has been said there already, except that I was also present at the meeting and that FSDeveloper is thereby involved in the initiative. Once there is more news to report I'll certainly do so.

Back home from Canada again

arno — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 13:49:00 GMT

This morning I came home from my bussiness trip to Canada, so currently I still have a small jetlag. But that is not the reason of this blog post, I have made available all the changes I made to ModelConverterX in a new development build now. This new build includes the features I blog about before. The main changes are:

Added beginning of a FS2004 scenery MDL reader. Currently only the geometry and materials will be read correctly, but I am working on transformations and more advanced features already.
The improved material editor GUI.
Fixed problems with reading 32 bit textures.
Improved the rendering of models with transparent textures, there should be less (hopefully no) drawing order issues now.

Especially for the FS2004 reader I am curious to hear how it is working with your FS2004 MDL files. So let me know if there are issues or suggestions.

FSX material settings

arno — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 21:20:00 GMT

Over the last days I have been working on extending the material settings supported by ModelConverterX. I have now come to the point that all of the specific settings that you can make with a FlightSimX material can be edited with ModelConverterX as welll. If you download the latest development build you can try it out.

Adding this function has two main benefits. First it is possible to make more accurate settings for the material when converting API macros. For example the options for constant lighting or no shadows can be enabled now. The second benefit is that the material settings can be studied when importing an already existing MDL file. In many cases this can give a good insight in which combination of settings works best.

There is one thing that I did not finish yet. I am still working on adding good descriptions of the settings, based on those given in the SDK. These descriptions show in the Material Editor when clicking on a certain property. As tomorrow I will be leaving for a short vacation to Portugal, this will not be finished this week.

Time for an update

arno — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 20:27:00 GMT

It has been a while since I wrote on this blog, other things kept me a bit too busy lately. So it is time for an update!

I am still working on the next release of ModelConverterX. I had hoped to have the version 1.0 release ready by now, but the last few bits seem to take slightly longer than planned. The only main feature I am still working on is the LOD Creator one. I want to add functionality that considers the texture mapping of the object as well. This however means I have to update my matrix inverse code and that is what I am working on now (I'll save you the math details).

After the version 1.0 release I am planning to close down the beta testing group that is around now and make the latest development build available to everyone. So that users have the option to download the latest stable release (that is stable) or the latest development release which has all recent features (and maybe some bugs). But first I need to focus on finishing the current version for release.

DevDays video

arno — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 08:26:00 GMT

Last May I gave a presentation about ESP and FSX at the DevDays in Amsterdam. Until now I never found out what they did with the video recording of that session, but today I found it back on the MSDN website. It is in Dutch, so unfortunately not everybody will be able to understand what I am saying.

NLR at YouTube

arno — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 16:22:00 GMT

At bit off topic maybe, but recently I found out that my company (the Dutch Aerospace Laboratory - NLR), put some nice promotion videos on YouTube. So if you might want to see a bit of the things I am doing for work have a look. Especially this video gives a nice overview of some of the simulation facilities I am working with.

Merry Christmas and Happy 2009

arno — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 09:36:00 GMT

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.

Public transport

arno — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 07:58:00 GMT

First, sorry for this rant, but at the moment I am just to annoyed by it.

Since a few moments the public transport company of Amsterdam already decided to make it more difficult for me to get to work. They are renovating some stations, including the one I have to depart from. To make that work easier they decided to cancel half of the metros (including the one I have to take of course), forcing me to change metros at another station.

That alone is something that I have to accept of course, but this week it seems they are really messing things up. There hasn't been a day yet this week that the metros that are still running didn't have an extra delay or one of them was cancelled as well. So I am getting used now to spend quite long every morning on the platform, hoping that a metro will arrive soon.

Would this be their revenge for the fact that I bought a car recently? Who knows, at least I am counting down the days that I still have to travel by metro to work every day. Soon I will be joining the traffic jam on the highway in the morning...

Back from vacation, but...

arno — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 20:10:00 GMT

I am back from vacation now for almost a week, but today I finally had the time to get up to date with all the posts on the FSDeveloper forum. This was partly because I had to go to Paris on bussiness trip two days this week and also because there were just to many things to catch up with. For example when I got back there were first some spammer problems on the forum that had to be addressed. Luckily it seems we solved that problem for the moment.

While on vacation I did some thinking about a new tool to make the creation of ground polygons easier. It seems that is still a big issue for many users. So I think I will create a tool that can do the ASM tweaks for you and also automatically split up your polygons in smaller pieces so that the curvation of the earth in FSX does not give trouble. I hope to start working on this tool soon. Another feature I have in mind is allowing to split big airports up into several reference points. This is good for the performance and should also reduce the deformation that sometimes appears when the polygons are too far away from the reference point.

And of course I am also still working on the ModelConverterX tool. I want to continue on the new features for version 1.0 soon as well. When I think about all the things I want to do, I almost need a new vacation right away...

Vacation

arno — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 09:14:00 GMT

Just to let you all know that I will not be writing on this blog in the next three weeks. The simple reason for that is that I will be on vacation. So see you again in three weeks time.

Levels of detail

arno — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 18:33:00 GMT

You might already have noticed that last weekend I released a new update for ModelConverterX. It contains just some small, but important bug fixes for the version 0.50 release.

So with those annoying bugs gone, I have started to concentrate on the next version again. The first feature I am working on is expanding the support for levels of detail. In the version 0.50 release I added support to read them from FSX MDL files and to display them in the preview. That is nice of course, but what is more important is being able to export them again. So on this version I want to add that functionality for the FSX MDL and OpenFlight writers.

Another feature I want to add is the automatic creation of the lower level LODs. I have been reading some papers on this subject and I think it should be possible to add such a function to ModelConverterX. I find especially the papers by Michael Garland quite interesting. I will start implementing that kind of logic soon and hopefully the results will be nice. I'll keep you informated about that.

But besides the LODs there are more features on my todo list and from next week I will also be on vacation for 3 weeks. That means you should not expect another ModelConverterX release soon.

User interface and manuals

arno — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 20:02:00 GMT

It's already some days ago that I wrote that the next version of ModelConverterX is almost ready. One reason for the delay is that I got a cold this week and that reduced the amount of time I would like to spend behind the screen a bit.

But another reason is that I, and I guess more developers, tend to forget how much time is needed to write or update the user manual. That process or also the process of creating a graphical user interface that is user friendly (and idiot proof) seems to take up more time when programming a tool like ModelConverterX than writing the actual logic of the tool. For example adding the functionallity of attached objects was not that hard, but making the dialog to edit such objects in a user friendly way took me more time.

Of course I am saying that the user interface and the manual should get less attention to save some time, as without those two things it will be a lot more difficult for people to use the tool. And what is the purpose of making a tool when nobody can use it?

I hope I can find the time this weekend though to finish that next release...

Back home again

arno — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 17:39:00 GMT

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

arno — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 05:47:00 GMT

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.

ModelConverterX update avaible

arno — Fri, 30 May 2008 17:25:00 GMT

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.