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Ground Polygon Wizard available

arno — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 06:00:00 GMT

I have just released a new version of ModelConverterX. The big change in this new release is that the ground polygon wizard is now included. Before I will go into the details of how to use this wizard, let's first take a look at the problems it is trying to solve.

When creating ground polygons scenery designers usually encounter these problems:

You need the FS2002 gamepack, since that is still the preferred way to create ground polygons. Some of the files of the gamepack are only on the FS2002 Pro disks, which means you have to find all kind of work arounds if you don't have FS2002. And of course not every designer is making scenery since the days of FS2002 already.
When you have the FS2002 gamepack and you have exported your ground polygons, you still need to edit the ASM source files. Else the ground polygons will flicker and will not show shadows correctly.
After you have finally got your ground polygons into FS you will see that big parts of the autogen around your scenery are gone.

The ground polygon wizard of ModelConverterX tries to help with these problems. I am not trying to say it is the magic solution that solves all your ground polygon problems, but hopefully it helps you.

With the wizard you can load your ground polygons from any file format that ModelConverterX can read, for example FSX MDL or COLLADA files. After you specify the options you want, the wizard will create a BGL file with ground polygons that behave like proper ground polygons.

Before using this functionality, make sure that you the path to SCASM specified in your options. The wizard is using SCASM to create the BGL file. Don't worry if you think SCASM is old, the code generated for the BGL is the same as the FS2002 gamepack would.

So now let me explain which options the wizard has and how to use it. At the top of ModelConverterX you see a button called wizards. Use this to open the ground polygon wizard, it will appear as a separate window. It looks like the one shown on the side here (but empty when first loaded). We'll now walk through all the options.

Select file to convert: here you select the file that contains your ground polygons and that ModelConverterX should load. This can be any format supported by ModelConverterX. Once you have selected a file here it will be loaded in the background and once that is done the object is shown in the preview and the rest of the form is populated.

Select output BGL file: here you select where ModelConverterX should generate the new BGL file with your ground polygons.

Filter out non-ground polygons: This option will remove any polygons from your loaded object that are not on the ground (z coordinate is zero). It will also filter out polygons that are on the ground, but pointing downwards. This ensures only ground polygons are left.

Layering and visibility: the grid shown here shows all materials used in your object. You should be able to recognize the names of the textures you are using. For each texture you specify at which layer you want it to be and what the visibility of that layer is. The visibility is not specified per texture, but per layer. So if you change the visibility of one texture on a layer, all others on the same layer get the same visibility.

Position: here you specify the position of the reference point of the object. If you import a BGL file, the position will already be read from it. When you are exporting to FSX it is also important to specify the altitude of the point you are exporting to, else the polygons might not connect correctly.

Slice polygons into 100 meter sections: this option slices big polygons into smaller section. This is required when you are exporting to FSX, else the ground polygons will not follow the curved earth correctly.

Divide polygons in 500 meter areas: this option divides the polygons into areas of 500 meter and exports them per area. When exporting from GMax all your ground polygons have the same reference point. This means they are all loaded at once and the scenery engine also has to evaluate all of them to see if they need to be drawn. What this option does is group them in areas of 500 x 500 meter. Each of these areas gets their own reference point. FS can not evaluate per area if it needs to be drawn or not. And the visibility is specified from the center of that area. In general this will give you a performance increase, especially when you only have part of the airport in view.

FSX or FS2004: select for which version you are exporting the BGL file. Due to the different earth model it is not possible to use the same BGL in both FSX and FS2004.

Now press the Convert button and wait until the wizard form closes. Your new BGL file should now be ready at the location you specified.

Besides the options you see two small buttons. These can be used to save and load the ground polygons wizard settings. If you are converting the same airport multiple times, this prevents you from entering all the information every time. Just save it once and reload it the next time you convert the object.

I hope this wizard is useful to you and improves the workflow of generating ground polygons. This is the first release of this feature, so please let me know if you have any suggestions or comments. There are some additional features that I have planned already, mainly the option to add night and seasonal textures with the wizard as well.

Some bad news and some good news (and some more bad news)

arno — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Let me start with the bad news, I have decided to stop the development of gPoly for the moment. It seems developing two tools, ModelConverterX and gPoly, at the same time does not work that well. I don't have enough time available to turn gPoly into a stable and usable tool at the moment. Maybe in the future I will continue on the development.

While working on gPoly I have learning a lot of interesting things, about using GeoTIFF images, about doing boolean operations on ground polygons or about Bezier curves. The good news is that not all of this knowledge goes into the fridge together with the gPoly tool. I have decided to add a ground polygon wizard to ModelConverterX. So this mean you can import a MDL file into ModelConverterX, determine the layering of the textures and then export to a BGL file with the FS2002-style ground polygons. And you don't need to do any ASM file tweaking for this at all. Actually you don't need to have the FS2002 gamepack at all.

At the moment I got the basics of the wizard working. You can apply the layers and export the ground polygons. The only part that is not working yet is the code to automatically slice polygons into sections of 100 meters. This is required for FSX.

And now the last part of (bad) news. This new functionality is not yet available in the development release. I had hoped to finish it last weekend, but ran out of time. Since we go on vacation in a few weeks, you will have to wait another month for it. But I didn't think it is a good idea to release some untested functionality, even to the development release just before my vacation.

Quick status update on the different projects

arno — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 05:00:00 GMT

Here is a quick status update for some of the projects I am working on. I know I have not blogged much recently. That is mainly because it is quite busy at my work recently, so that affects the amount of free time a bit. Unfortunately I don't expect this will change very soon.

In order of priority the projects have for me at the moment, these are some of the things I am working on:

SketchUp tutorial

At the FSWeekend in November there will be a FSDeveloper stand again (like last year). This year I plan to let visitors try their luck on modelling scenery objects with SketchUp in the stand. With that in mind I have started working on a new tutorial that will explain in detail how to make your own house for FS using SketchUp. I want to have this tutorial ready before the FSWeekend.

gPoly

After a long time of no progress, I have been able to do some work on the gPoly tool again as well. Currently I am adding one more feature (drawing lines). When that feature is added I think there is enough functionality for a first public alpha version. Although I will need to polish some features a bit more to make them useful to other people than myself.

While working on gPoly, I am trying to follow the Test Driven Development (TDD) approach that I have been reading about recently. That turns out to be an interesting experiment and I hope it will result in easier to maintain software in the end.

ModelConverterX

Also for ModelConverterX there are still some open issues. These mainly deal with finishing the aircraft importer, especially the functionality related to the conditions under which certain parts display need to be made a little more user friendly.

gPoly status update #11

arno — Sat, 29 May 2010 05:00:00 GMT

I have made some progress again on the gPoly tool. The two main features I worked on today are finishing the Bezier curves and extending the user interface so that you can edit the texture mapping of the polygons. Since these feature are difficult to explain with text or pictures, I have made a little preview video showing how you could use them. You can view this video here.

Next item I am going to work on is vertex snapping. When that is done I will start laying down the polygons for my test airport. I am looking forward to actually make some real polygons for a scenery.

gPoly status update #10

arno — Sun, 23 May 2010 05:00:00 GMT

This evening I have been working on a feature for gPoly that will make it a lot easier to draw curved edges of your ground polygons. By using Bezier curves you don't have to add many points to get a nice smooth curve. All you have to do is set the begin and end point and use a couple of control points to determine the shape of the curve. In the images below you see a few example I made while testing. The two points at the top are the control points that determine the shape. You can see that by changing their position, the curve has changed.

As you can see from the images I can draw the curves in gPoly now. Tomorrow I will continue working on this feature and check if the texture mapping is assigned correctly and see if exporting works fine. But I am sure this feature will be very useful when drawing your airport layout.

gPoly status update #9

arno — Sat, 15 May 2010 05:00:00 GMT

Just a quick status update for the gPoly tool. I think I got the code working now that will ensure that your polygons are automatically sliced into segments of no more than 100 meter. This ensures that there will be no issues with the curve of the earth in FSX. The same code can also be used to divide the polygons of the airport into different segments, so that not everything uses the same reference point and will be rendered at the same time. Especially for big airports I am sure this is important to keep the performance good, although I will have to do more experimenting later on to find the best parameters.

With the exporting side now sort of working, I will move over to the user interface again. Next on my list are improvements to the drawing of polygons (vertex snapping for example) and making it easier to update the texture mapping of the polygons. While working on those features, I will also be drawing the rest of the polygons for my test airport.

gPoly status update #8

arno — Thu, 13 May 2010 05:00:00 GMT

I have now chosen the airport that I will use as a test field for developing the gPoly tool. It is Marshfield Municipal Airport (KGHG) in Massachusetts. So I have drawn some of the aprons and taxiways and am testing now if I can export them correctly to FS.

At first I was exporting with the FS2002 style code used for ground polygons most of the time. As long as I export everything with one reference point things looked fine, but when I divided the polygons over different reference points, to have better control over the performance, I noticed that there are gaps visible between the polygons. In FS2004 the same approach worked fine, so it seems the gaps are caused by the curved earth in FSX. At the moment there is a very useful discussion going on at the FSDeveloper forum about this issue. I still hope that once I understand how FSX corrects the polygons for the curve of the earth, that I can export them again with a compensation so that they line up correctly.

To learn more about this curved earth, I decided to start with exporting the ground polygons as FSX MDL files as well. In these MDL files I am bending the ground polygons so that they follow the curve of the earth. This approach seems to work quite good, although I still have some issues with gPoly not always triangulating the polygons correctly. Between the different MDL files I still see a small gap sometimes, but it is much smaller than in the FS2002 style approach. I hope that by improving my math a bit I can get things aligned correctly again.

The fact that the FSX MDL files seems to work quite well is quite exciting, that would open a lot of possibilities to make better ground polygons. For example with reflection when it is raining or with bump maps. I am looking forward to continue the experimenting.

Which airport?

arno — Fri, 07 May 2010 05:00:00 GMT

Now that I can export some basic polygons from the gPoly tool, I am looking to go one little step further. I am looking for an airport that I can use as a test case to develop the tool further, since there is no better way to find bugs than while actually working with the tool on a project. In the end I will be using the tool for the EHAM Schiphol scenery of NL2000, but that airport is a bit too complex for a test airport.

See this thread on FSDeveloper for a little more background on "my requirements" for the airport. But basically I am looking for an airport that is not too complex and not too simple. And since having imagery available is a must, I am likely to end up in the US with the free USGS data available.

So let me know if you have any suggestions for a nice airport. As a side effect of using it to develop gPoly further I might even finish a scenery of it.

gPoly status update #7

arno — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 05:00:00 GMT

It feels like it is a long time ago I wrote a status update about the gPoly tool. And now that I think about it, it is actually a long time ago. But this weekend I have done some work on the tool again. I have mainly focussed on two functionalities:

Being able to save your gPoly project file to disk and afterwards loading it back again. This might be some functionality that sounds very basic, but until now I had not coded it. For my tests I just every time drew some polygons manually. I can now save this effort, since I can load back the projects I made before.
Being able to export the project to FS in the form of a BGL file. I have got a basic export working now. But the output is not optimized for performance yet and also the slicing up of the polygons as required by FSX for the curvation of the earth is not yet done. At least I have a basis no to work from, when I start adding those features.

I plan to first improve the exporter further, so it writes the kind of code that works in FSX, before I return to the GUI part of gPoly and start polishing the features there. Now most of them have some rough edges left. But that is for another status update.

Jetlag almost gone

arno — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 06:00:00 GMT

We are back home for a few days now, after enjoying a two week vacation in California. We had a lot of fun there and now that the jetlag is almost gone, it is time to spend some time on my FS tools again.

Initially I plan to focus on ModelConverterX a bit more. I want to finish the function to minimize drawcalls and will try to fix some bugs in the COLLADA reader. Since my posts about using Sketchup it seems many people give it a try, and they find many new bugs as well.

After that I want to focus more on gPoly again. I got some great new ideas for this tool and I am looking forword to continue coding on it. My first focus will be on the functionality to actually export the polygons you draw to FS, since without that the tool does not have that much usage.