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.cld file format

theisomizer

theisomizer

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Hi all,

It's been many years, but I'm coming back to the FS community again. I've been doing a lot of work lately on picking up some old projects. Hopefully I'll have some more useful stuff to present soon (especially on the .MDL file format).

Anyways, for now here is a small, very simple tool that I wrote that can read .cld files (used by the weather system) and dump them to a text file. (Very basic) source code is included so anyone can explore the file structure. Maybe somebody can do something useful with this. I don't know. Let me know if anyone has any questions, problems, or ideas for expanding this tool.
 

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Hi,

Thanks for sharing.

Before you spend a lot of time on mdl files later on, there is a format description for those on the wiki here already.
 
Hey arno, long time no see!

I definitely will give the wiki a go! I am quite impressed, I helped create the FSX MDL Page back in 2007, and last time I checked it was a great starting point but it was far from complete. It looks like a lot of progress has been made in the last few years, and it is fairly complete!

I feel like I have a decent amount of material to add to it, especially from the last project I was working on, OpenXToMDL. Even though I released it on here like 4 years ago and hadn't really worked on it since, I've had a renewed interest in it and Flight Sim as a whole in the last few months.

I've been working on re-engineering OpenXToMDL from the ground up lately. I originally wrote it to match the internal structure of XToMDL as closely as possible, which was necessary to ensure the MDL files compiled completely correctly (as I had much less knowledge about software engineering and computer graphics back then). OpenXToMDL had a very static structure and was not a very good design, despite the fact it worked well. As I am working through all of my old notes and code again I'm realizing that a good number of the limitations of XToMDL and of the FSX graphics engine in general are a result of having a bloated, inefficient tool for working with it.

I'm specifically working on much improved handling and use of the .x file right now, as parsing the x file and generating the intermediate xml is no easy task. Converting the xml to a MDL is a trivial process since the elements of the xml and MDL have essentially a one-to-one correspondence. Similarly, converting an MDL to xml is straightforward enough, however extracting information from the xml to a .x file and (or any other usable 3d graphics format) is only easily performed on the mesh information, as the materials and animation data are fairly FSX specific. Extracting this information is possible but isn't easy.

Anyways, I think I'm going to stop programming for a few days and try to do some work updating the wiki. I don't want to keep any information to myself, if I know it, i want it to be available to all!
 
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