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Dummy/Placeholder animation tags?

Arno,

This is indeed the "holy grail" of prop conversion. Automation of the prop state conversion would be so great to have!

I have 3 examples for you with models that are composed as Tom has described it. With those you can verify all you learn from Toms test model.

Plus the two models with visibility issues that you asked for.

It will be weekend before I am back at my computer though, then I send them over.



From mobile hence short
 
Thanks Martin.

At the moment it would help me most to have models without many other animations, so I can focus on this bit.
 
Perfect, looking forward to test with them after the weekend.
 
Hi,

Here is a test MDL file. I have also included the X file. These have been generated by MakeMDL from GMAX.

The only parts included are:

Exterior (dummy node)
prop0_still (cube)
prop0_slow (partial disk)
prop0_blurred (disk)
prop1_still (cube)
prop1_slow (partial disk)
prop1_blurred (disk)

I loaded it into FS20004 and confirmed that the animations all work.

If you need anything different just let me know, it's easy to do.

Hope this helps,
 

Attachments

Thanks, I'll have a look. Sounds good.
 
Thanks, this is a perfect test model. When I currently import it, I don't see all three states yet.
 
Hi,

I have found a work around that seems to work for the prop animations. It's not a generic solution that might work for all kind of visibility conditions, but it's a start. I'll do some more testing and then hopefully I can release something soon.
 
Woohoo, that sounds great. Hopefully we can work out the rest of them.
 
Making progress, as you can see in the screenshot all three prop states have been read for this aircraft model now.

1523730571705.png
 
Making progress, as you can see in the screenshot all three prop states have been read for this aircraft model now.
Click to expand...

Arno, this is tremendous news! Thanks for all the work you're doing! I'm in the middle of trying to convert an FS9 AI aircraft for MAIW into FSX / P3D format and picking out parts that have become locked due to unreadable visibility conditions is hugely difficult. Do you think that this new development for MCX will be able to detect custom visibility code as well, or just stock variations?
 
Hi,

Yes, it should work with custom visibility conditions in the FS2004 MDL as well. Not sure if the resulting FSX condition is always valid, but I don't know enough about aircraft design for that. So I guess once I have released a first development release we'll find out :)
 
That's amazing Arno, fingers crossed!! If it only means that MCX can now see the stuck parts, allowing them to be selected and new conditions to be applied to them, it would be more than enough and will save us all much weeping and hair pulling :)
 
Hi,

It took a little longer than hoped, but I'm pushing a new development release now that has the visibility conditions implemented as well.

It's important that you check in the options (importer settings) that the "Use conditions" option is set to "Visibility conditions". It's the new default value, but it might be set differently in your configuration.

I'm not sure if the code in the modeldef is always right, I tried to translate it. But I'm not so familiar with custom modeldef code yet ;). So if there are suggestions on how to improve it let me know.
 
Hi,

Thanks for all your hard work. My report:

Using MCX 1.4.0.0 cf3d2a4f DEV 4/21/2018

1. Imported the FS2004 dc6ans_combi.mdl (our standard test MDL file) into MCX.
2. Exported as an FSX MDL file.
3. Loaded it into FSX SP2.

Results:

1. Model appears only in top down view. Spot view is very far away and I cannot find the plane. It also has a weird display, flipping back and forth between two views.
2. In Top Down view, the frame rate is 0.6, compared to 35 using the original FS2004 model.
3. The control surfaces do not move.
4. The flaps have been translated to the center point of the plane.
5. The prop for engine one seems to change its visibility when I press Ctrl-E to start it, but I can't change it back. The other props don't seem to change.
6. The other visibility conditions do not seem to change.
7. There is no VC, as expected. I guess I would need to change the Importer Options back to the way it was in earlier versions and choose the VC option value in the popup box to export the VC?

Within MCX, I can report:

1. Almost all of the animations seem to work when I move the slider, good job.
2. The rudder spins around 360 degrees, instead of moving back and forth the required number of degrees. I assume it should center at keyframe 50; it is rotated at 180 degrees at keyframe 50.
3. Both ailerons move in the same direction; I don't know if FSX requires them to move in opposite directions since they don't move in the sim.

Hope this helps,
 
I think it would be very useful if there were some sort of a notification of animations that haven't been processed or won't be processed.
Incorrectly functioning animations can be fixed afterwards provided they have been processed in the first place.
 
Hi Tom,

I must say I don't know enough about aircraft design, so I never tried to just export to FSX and see what that does. I think it would be better to manually check the visibility conditions (especially the custom ones) to see if they are correct or else remove them. Same would go for the animations. I guess the developer doing the conversion still has to check things.

I'll try to do some more testing with other models to catch issues.
 
tgibson said:
1. Model appears only in top down view. Spot view is very far away and I cannot find the plane. It also has a weird display, flipping back and forth between two views.
Click to expand...

MCX always fails to export proper values for model radius and the bounding box. This has to be edited manually with RADitor after export.

2. In Top Down view, the frame rate is 0.6, compared to 35 using the original FS2004 model.
Click to expand...

IIRC this is a product of the model radius bug.

3. The control surfaces do not move.
Click to expand...

Names of imported standard animations of FS9 are not matched to the tags in the Modeldef.xml. Animations will have to be assigned manually.

4. The flaps have been translated to the center point of the plane.
Click to expand...

Product of the behavior described in issue #3 (missing animation).

7. There is no VC, as expected. I guess I would need to change the Importer Options back to the way it was in earlier versions and choose the VC option value in the popup box to export the VC?
Click to expand...

Set the model option in the importer popup to "2" to view the VC and export it as a separate model.
Adapt the model.cfg accordingly.

2. The rudder spins around 360 degrees, instead of moving back and forth the required number of degrees. I assume it should center at keyframe 50; it is rotated at 180 degrees at keyframe 50.
Click to expand...

The original animation requires to be keyframed. Mind pivot orientation.

3. Both ailerons move in the same direction; I don't know if FSX requires them to move in opposite directions since they don't move in the sim.
Click to expand...

Same as the previous issue. Keyframes are required for proper results.
 
Hi,

I thought these were the things that Arno wanted to fix?

And the box to set 2 to view the VC no longer appears with the importer settings set to "Visibility Conditions". Thus I assumed I needed to set it back to something else (but not sure what that would be).
 
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