Michael Selig <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: > Chuck Dome has OK'ed our use of his models w/ FlightGear. Here's a list of > his ~70+ aircraft that he has GPL'd: > http://www.fs2000.org/dome/index.htm > > This list grows w/ updates coming from: > http://home.cfl.rr.com/cdfss/ >
This is great! But we need panel work big time. It'd be nice to get more complete panels. > Unfortunately, these newer MSFS models (FS2000/2002) are not FlightGear > friendly for reasons that I do not understand. The error deals w/ the > textures (perhaps being too large?). If I delete the textures, the model > will load, but it runs really slow (the .mdl file is ~1MB). Seems to me that the organization of the files is quite different and perhaps plib is more suited to the kind of method that ac3d uses (and maybe 3ds). The ac3d file is grouped into objects that often contain surface elements. For example, in some of the ac3d models the fuselage is considered a single object and it contains vertices that define the object, multiple surfaces that reference particular vertices in the object and a texture mappings for each surface that reference the same texture. Remember only one texture per "object". Now when converting from mdl to ac3d using ppe (which _maybe_ isn't the same thing as just loading the mdl) I've noticed that the output from ppe puts adjacent surfaces using the same texture into an object. This makes sense since ac3d objects contain a single texture and mulitple surfaces. Rather than sorting out the vertices that go with each surface, the exporter puts every single vertex in the entire model into every single object. But the created object only contains the surfaces and the corresponding texture assigned to it. This creates a huge ac3d file, especially with the more detailed models that tend to be made for FS2000 and FS2002. I can't say for sure but perhaps the mdl loader packs all the vertices for the entire model into each ssg node that refers to an "object". This would explain the slowness. If the model ends up with two hundered "objects" because of complex texturing, then a 5000 vertice model would become a 1,000,000 vertice model. Best, Jim _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
