FS2004 Unlimited Export (part 1)

[arno]

For quite some time it has been on my wishlist to study the FS2004 Unlimited Export tutorial that Bill Lionheart made many years ago. It is a very well done and extensive tutorial of over 50 slides. So maybe that scared me off a bit. But recently I read through the tutorial and with my tool developer perspective I realized that it would not be that hard to implement that logic in ModelConverterX. The tutorial has to do al kind of additional steps to work around limitations in the FS2004 GMax gamepack, for example to get your X files. But within ModelConverterX I have full control and access to these items. What also helped is that recently I implemented other ASM tweaks in the FS2004 MDL writer, so that made it easier to do the unlimited export tweak as well.

The current development release of ModelConverterX has the first part of the unlimited export function implemented. That is the bit that works around the 4 mm weld limitation of MakeMDL by scaling up the model on export and then tweaking the ASM file to get the proper size.

If you enable the Unlimited Export Tweak option on the FS2004 aircraft MDL export dialog this 4 mm weld limitation tweak is applied to your FS2004 aircraft model. This means that you can use small details in your cockpit again without losing them on export.

I plan to implement part 2 of the tweak soon as well, those are the tweaks to work around the 65k triangle limit of MakeMDL. Once that is done I will make another blog post about it.

Continue reading...

 

[Hiroshi Igami]

I know Arno knows but for other person
Basic to understand for a things called "Unlimited Export" is it's showing several LOD models at once.

But that doesn't mean can be really unlimited .

And the problem is here. BGL_CALL_32
"On the root ASM's last part there is a BGL_JUMP_32 at original and will be changed to BGL_CALL_32 on that system"

Each LOD data part will be placed after that part so if total of each LOD part (can see by asmfile) exceeds the range of BGL_CALL32 , can't call.

Example: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
LOD_0L label BGLCODE
include C:\Users\user\Desktop\A320NEOWORKTMP\TDS_A320N_PW1100G_JM_0.asm
LOD_1L label BGLCODE
include C:\Users\user\Desktop\A320NEOWORKTMP\TDS_A320N_PW1100G_JM_1.asm
LOD_2L label BGLCODE
include C:\Users\user\Desktop\A320NEOWORKTMP\TDS_A320N_PW1100G_JM_2.asm
Example: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If LOD0L + LOD1L total gets over the range of BGL_CALL32 can't call LOD_2L
So it's not really Unlimited there is still a limitation.

Why I know is thats how I got when I made the A350 for FS2004.
Then how I made it is made interior and exterior model part common and saved total memory.

Also thinking from how it will be used.
Isn't it better make it as a simple utility which can just merge several model ?

 

[arno]

Hi,

I am sure nothing is really unlimited in life

But I don't think that the limit you mention here is specific to the ULE tweaks. Both the BGL_JUMP_32 and BGL_CALL_32 use the same datatype of the offset of the label that they should jump/call to. So both of them can skip over the same amount of maximum bytes. So that means that the limit you hit could also be hit when you make a normal model with many LOD models. But of course with the additional details put in via ULE you are probably more likely to hit it.