Arno Gerretsen : Scenery design

Google Building Maker

arno — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:50:00 GMT

Today I stumbled upon this new tool by Google: Building Maker. It is quite impressive to see how with a few mouse clicks you can make a 3D model using images showing the object from different angles. I guess this way of constructing would be the dream of many FS developers as well.

(Please visit the site to view this media)

I did try the tool for a simple office building and that worked quite good, but I am not sure how easy it is with irregular shapes. I guess it is mainly suitable for objects that don't need too much detail and mainly rely on their photo textures.

I also noticed that the latest Google Sketchup has a function to use Google Streetview images on the object directly. Although it might be easy, this new feature and the Building Maker tool make me wonder about the copyrights of the images used. We are not allowed to take images from Google Earth and use them in FS, but these kind of object depend a lot on such images. So would a designer who made an object like that be allowed to use it outside Google Earth?

KMZ reader

arno — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 17:13:00 GMT

As a little bonus feature on top of the COLLADA reader I added yesterday, I have now also added a KMZ reader. KMZ is the file format used by Google Earth for its objects and basically it is a ZIP file containing the COLLADA file for the object and all the texture used all in one.

Below is a little screenshot of this reader in action. I took this cottage object from the Google Sketchup Warehouse to test if the reader is working fine and as you can see it is.

COLLADA reader

arno — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 11:37:00 GMT

Last I week I gave Google Sketchup another try and it seems a program you can learn to use quite quickly. If you compare it with GMax I think it has a learning curve that is much less steep. And I think if you model carefully in Sketchup you can make models with it that are suitable for real time rendering. So I think that for some people who just want to make some simple objects Sketchup might be a nice alternative.

But how to get those objects into FS? The free version of Sketchup only exports KMZ and DAE files. You could probably convert them to 3DS, import into GMax and then export, but I think all those extra steps make things too complicated. So I decided to work on a ModelConverterX feature that has been on my list for a while already, support for COLLADA DAE files.

I am not there yet, but I can now read the basic geometry from COLLADA files into ModelConverterX, below you see a screenshot where I loaded the COLLADA test duck. I still need to work on reading the materials used correctly and I guess some testing to see how robust the code is would be nice as well. But with a bit of luck I will have a beta of the COLLADA reader in the development release soon.

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.

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!

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.

FSDS support

arno — Mon, 25 May 2009 19:26:00 GMT

One of the features on the ModelConverterX wishlist is adding support for writing FSDS FSC files. I can now say that I started working on this. I got a SDK from Louis Sinclair, the author of FSDS, that explains how the file format works. To get more used to the format I decided to first make a reader that can import FSC files. The current development release has an initial version of this reader included already. It should read the geometry correctly, but I am still working on animations and other advanced features. I think I'll also need some more test files to test the reader on those aspects. After the reader is done, I will start with the writer.

That I started on this FSDS support does not mean that the FS2004 MDL reader is completely done, I still have to look at the attachpoints and figure out a way to deal with the conditions and LODs. These issues are still high on my todo list as well and if there is feedback on how the FS2004 MDL reader works with your animations I would also like to now.

Using my own tool

arno — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 19:07:00 GMT

In the last week I did not do so much development on the ModelConverterX tool. The main reason for that was that I was actually using the tool myself. In the NL2000 project we have a collection of hundreds API macros that are positioned through the entire country of the Netherlands. It would be a lot of work to replace all of these objects, which we have build in the 10 years that the team exists, with new GMax made objects in the FSX MDL format. So therefore I have used the ModelConverterX tool to convert them all.

While working on that last week I found (and fixed) a few small bugs in the tool. And I also got some ideas for new features. For example a way to find missing textures or maybe only report the textures used by a library would be useful already. So I'll put these on the wishlist for the tool.

I have now started working on some other of the features on the wishlist. Improving the FS2004 MDL reader and adding support to read attachpoints from MDL files are now highest on my list.

NL2000 GMax course

arno — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 16:07:00 GMT

On July 4th 2009 the Netherlands 2000 Scenery Design Team will be organising a one day GMax course. The aim of this course is to let new developers who might be interested in designing their own scenery as a part of the NL2000 team try for a day, with the guidance of the current team members. There is no obligation to join afterwards, although we would be happy with some extra members to build more objects. So if you are interested, have a look at the NL2000 website for more details. Oh and maybe it is good to mention that the course will be in Dutch, as we are a Dutch scenery team.

QGIS

arno — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 18:05:00 GMT

Until now I was mainly using fGIS when I wanted to view or edit shapefiles, but since a year or two the updates to fGIS are no longer publicly available due to some license issue. Last week I bought an interesting book about opensource GIS and it brought the QGIS application to my attention again. I had tried an earlier build of this application some time ago, but then I found it more difficult to use than fGIS. Now I tried a more recent build and I am impressed, it is a really powerfull application and quite easy to use. So I will replace fGIS by QGIS as my default GIS application for viewing and editing vector data.

Animations with more than 1024 frames

arno — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 17:15:00 GMT

It is about three years ago that I figured out how to make animations with more than 1024 frames for FS2004. But until now the only explanation other developers had on how this works was this quick forum post I made. I admit it is a bit late, but I have finally finished the tutorial that explains the process in a more detail. I also try to explain how the animations work, hopefully it makes sense. A bit thanks to all the forum users who kept asking questions about this, that is what made sure I finished the tutorial by now.

FSX SDK on Linux

arno — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 03:29:00 GMT

Your first question might be why I would like to do this? There are multiple reason for that, but the main reason is that I was not so pleased with processing my big aerial imagery on Vista. It just doesn't seem to work nicely when you are processing files of a few GB in size. So I decided to do the processing of my imagery on my other machine that is running Linux.

After the processing was done I had the option to copy the resulting image file back to my Windows machine to make the BGL or I could try to do that on Linux as well. So that is when I tried to run the FSX SDK tools with Wine under Linux. I only tried the terrain tools until now, but it worked well. All I had to do was copy the resulting BGL onto my Windows machine to view it in FSX. But copying a BGL of a few hundred megabytes is still a lot quicker than copying a few gigabyte of imagery files.

Some Wiki updates

arno — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 12:18:00 GMT

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

arno — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 09:07:00 GMT

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.

The tool I should have made earlier

arno — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 21:16:00 GMT

I think it was more than a year ago. Nick asked me if I would make a tool and my answer was that it was not necesairy because the tweak only involved a few easy lines of ASM code. Yesterday I started making a tool for this simple tweak, plus some other features. What am I talking about? Ground polygons. If you look at the forums they remain a hot issue all the time. Having to use the FS2002 gamepack, having to tweak the ASM code by hand.

So now I started working on a tool that I called GroundPolygonAssistent. It will help you to do the following things:

Tweak the ASM code of ground polygons to make them proper ground polygons
Combine different layers of ground polygons in one BGL file
Split the polygons if they are bigger than a certain size, this can be useful for FSX, where they have to be smaller than 100 meter to work correctly with the curvation of the earth
Output the polygons with different reference points, this can be useful for big airports where accuracy errors occur at big distances from the reference point and it can also increase the overall performance a bit
Reproject the polygons, sometimes the data might be in a different projection than the flat earth one used by FS for its XYZ coordinate system, in that case the tool will help you to keep the accuracy of your origional data

Below you see a first screenshot of the user interface. As the tool is not finished yet (actually the buttons have no functions yet at this moment), things might change a bit. I will keep you informed about the progress.

Ground polygon tutorial

arno — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 21:06:00 GMT

Making ground polygons with GMax always seems to be a hot issue, especially the fact that you have to use the FS2002 gamepack and apply some tweaks to make things work. So this challenging part of scenery design gets discussed a lot on the forums. But now there is a new tutorial that might help you. In it Bill Womack explains how he made the runway for his Plum Island scenery. So have a look at this nice tutorial.

FSDS design blog

arno — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 19:21:00 GMT

For those of you using FSDS as a modelling tool for Flight Simulator, it might be interesting to know that Adam Howe of Abacus has started a blog now. It already contains some tutorials that seem useful for FSDS users and hopefully the future will bring more interesting posts.

From the old shoebox (1)

arno — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 10:33:00 GMT

Today I was cleaning out some old stuff in my computer room, when I came across some old sketches I made when designing scenery objects for FS98. Since then things have changed a bit, so I thought it would be funny to show them to you.

I should start by mentioning that at that time I was not using any GUI to design my scenery objects. I wrote the SCASM API code by hand, using a plain text editor, some pieces of paper and a pencil. That is where these sketches come from thus.

This first sketch gives a quick outline of a windmill object I was making. For all parts the diameter and the height is mentioned in meter (or SCASM units, as things were still integer point coordinates in that time). Those familiar with Dutch will see that I wrote a comment below saying that all cylinders should be eight sided.

This second sketch is from the control tower and hangar at Texel airport. Because I was writing all SCASM code by hand, I needed a reference which vertex had which number, so that I could define the polygons between the correct vertices. In this sketch you see that I made two 3D views of the building (from the front and back), where I added the numbers of all the vertices. This allowed me to define the polygons a lot quicker.

The last sketch is from the control tower at Hoogeveen. Also in this case you can see that I wrote all the vertex numbers in the sketch. When two numbers are listed the first one is for the ground level and the second one for the roof. The green numbers also indicate the height that the roof was supposed to get.

When I find more interesting sketches or documents from my history of scenery design I will post them here again.