Leaderboard

Conversion of all 3D to the new toolchain is complete and we have exported out all of the 737 objects from the new version of Blender. Jan and I will begin testing the functionality to see what I may have missed in the conversion as I had to hand-edit an enormous volume of elements to prep it for the conversion software. Next up is converting the sounds. The attached screenshot shows a "quickie adjustment" I made to test drive the 3D update process......about 15 minutes of fooling around in Blender to see how quick I could make an update to the 3D with the new toolchain. (I know, the circle isn't perfectly round....but it was only 15 minutes) -tkyler

So the following screenshot tells two stories. 1). We have almost completed the conversion of all 3D assets to to the new Toolchain. Two assets remain and I'll probably knock that out over the weekend. The second story....is that with the upgrading of our assets, we finally have a workflow between 3D and Substance Painter® for texturing....in this screenshot the glare shield has a bit of a texture to it, nothing major, but adds to the immersion that's so important to us. We'll be able to start sharpening up several 3D elements that are a bit low-res by todays standards. The roadmap after this 3D conversion is to then convert the sounds to FMOD, upgrade the 3D a bit, including a revised cabin and working doors and make any adjustments required by the X-Plane flight model itself for stability and we'll probably put out an update then. Then I'll move back to the FMS to finish up my integration of the XP1100 data format and get the holds integrated, the VNAV cleaned up and several other FMS polish work. -tkyler

Ah. I was flying on VATSIM at the time anyway. I had Traffic Global set to 0 but I'll uninstall it before my next VATSIM flight. Have to say, I reloaded teh flight and started over...and it ws gorgeous, beautiful flight. Did a practice approach to a missed and came back around and landed. Flying this thing on VATSIM is a lot of fun!

another update, for those who may not have seen discussions in other threads. As much as I've spoken about FMS work...that was mostly because all the other aspects of our project, the 3D, the sounds, etc....were bound up in deprecated technology and tools, making it VERY difficult to update things....whereas the FMS was just code work. This was not really a lack of foresight on our part regarding the 3D tools, but rather being so far ahead of the game way back when we started, we came up with our own solutions.....that were not quite compatible with the way X-Plane moved with regards to developer tools. WELL.....thanks to Ted Greene of Laminar.....he has coded up a "converter" between the old toolchain we used and the 'toolchain of today'. Only in the last week did we work out some critical bugs that allowed us to begin converting all our assets into the modern workflow supported by Laminar. We are currently in the process of converting all our work to this new toolchain and have converted some of the most complex aspects of it already...so we do not anticpate much resistance converting the rest of the work. This converter by Laminar is a huge lifeline of sorts and will allow us to again respond quickly to bugs and manage updates once we establish a new baseline with these tools. -TomK