MCX on Linux with WINE

[Heretic]

Is somebody successfully running MCX (development release) with WINE on Linux?

On WINE 4.5 (x64) and when using a virtual desktop, I can get it started and use the UI, but the model rendering itself doesn't work at all.

Arno's latest test on Linux was a few years ago and did not yield much info apart from "it works".

 

[arno]

Hi,

It must be 8 years ago or so that I last tried to run it on Linux. At that time the biggest problem was also the OpenGL library I used that didn't work well on Linux (might have been the it worked was with an older version when I did the OpenGL rendering different).

 

[Heretic]

Yeah, 8 years sounds about right.

What library is MCX using? This one?
https://www.colinfahey.com/csharp_wrapper_for_opengl/csharp_wrapper_for_opengl.html

 

[arno]

Yes, that's the wrapper I use.

 

[Heretic]

I sadly couldn't find any info regarding its use in Linux/WINE. If the wrapper hasn't changed and it used to work in older WINE versions, I might just be missing a dependency.

 

[arno]

It's really too long ago I tried, I think I have updated to a new version of the library for sure since then. I can't remember if MCX used this library from the start or if initially I used something else.

 

[Heretic]

Do you still have your Ubuntu installation?

If you've got a minute, just try it in WINE for me. I could then rule out that I'm only missing a dependency.

 

[arno]

No, the machine I used to run Ubuntu on is long dead. Since I develop for FS only I decided to drop the Linux environment and work on Windows only.

 

[Heretic]

No, the machine I used to run Ubuntu on is long dead. Since I develop for FS only I decided to drop the Linux environment and work on Windows only.

Ah, too bad. Thanks for replying anyway.

 

[arno]

If I can get a virtualbox with Ubuntu somewhere, I might give it a try.

 

[Heretic]

Apparently these images are ready for use: https://virtualboxes.org/images/

 

[Heretic]

Out of curiosity, I've tried MCX again with WINE 5.16, installing nothing buit the Visual C++ 2015-2019 Runtimes and NET Framework 4.8 and was surprised that it seems to work just fine when started from a terminal with "wine ModelConverterX.exe". This is the exterior model of the default XP11 747-400:

Even X-Plane animations are imported.

The only thing that needs to be adapted to X-Plane is the animation slider granularity as most animations use a 0.0 to 1.0 range.

 

[arno]

Hi,

Nice try

There is a setting that can scale animations in MCX, but I am not sure if I am using that one in the X-Plane OBJ importer as well. When reading from other formats you sometimes also have the issue that animation lengths are different.

 

[Heretic]

Yeah, that's the issue. It would be helpful if, say, the type-in box supported decimals so one can enter, e.g. "0.51".

 

[arno]

I'll see if that's possible, I'm not sure if the frame is a double or int internally.

What I do in other importers is just scale the values. So that's another approach.

 

[Heretic]

That'd work as well.