Happy Thanksgiving!

Just to wish all my family, American friends, and readers a very happy Thanksgiving! I will be heading off for my usual Florida break in January. I am hoping that there will be a beta version of my new ‘Scenery Engine’ before I go and that I will have time to work on it in the warmer weather. Progress has been good over the past week and the library is coming along. What is it? Well I am working on a program library which encompasses all the elements of FS Scenery.

So far I am able to decode most of the parts of a scenery BGL file (those which are compiled using BGLComp. The library can generate a tree showing all the different bits of the scenery file and allow the user to modify them. Once the decoding is done then I plan to add the ability to compile the information again. The library can handle both FS9 and FSX BGL files and recognize the difference between them. Eventually I would like to include support for those BGL files created using SHP2Vec. I don’t plan to support the older FS9 methods which SHP2Vec has replaced – mostly because I have never really gotten into them. My hope is that the new engine can form the basis of some flexible scenery design tools and I may make it available to other developers if there is enough interest.

Slow Progress

There is a canal near my home which has a lot of narrow boats on it. For the non-Brits these are the modern day versions of working boats which used to carry goods across the country on the canals.  They were drawn by horses and have the distinction of being narrow -6 feet 10 inches wide – and long – up to 72 feet.  These days they are used for leisure and are well fitted out with kitchens, showers, bedrooms and all mod cons!

One boat is called Slow Progress and has a Snail painted on the side.  Since the top speed allowed on canals in the UK is 4 miles per hour it does indeed take a long time to get anywhere.

You may wonder what this has to do with programming?  Well I am back working on my new ‘Scenery Engine’  This, I hope, will one day be able to read from, store, manipulate, and write any form of scenery file in FS9 and FSX.   It is a single dll (although it uses my common library as well) and I hope it will form the basis of future scenery tools from me, and maybe others if it is deemed useful to third parties.  Progress is slow and sedate, but I am learning a lot along the way.  Generally I take a couple of weeks over Christmas and the New Year to concentrate on software (that is how LOM got started) so maybe by early next year a version will be completed………………….or then again maybe not!

Computer Problems

Last week I tried to install Windows Media Player 11.    The install went fine but I started getting some problems so decided to unload it – not a good move as there were problems left so I did a restore to the point just before the install.  An even worse move as this wrecked my operating system and to cut a long story short I had to re-install XP and most of my software.

Things are almost back to normal and I am hoping to start working on software again soon.