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So I guess the purpose of my last article was rather obscured by the fact that I refuse to divulge any real information about anything, cause I'm just like that. So here's what led me to post the XML blob for attach points and hopefully this will clarify some things for folks:

Basically, with the release of the FS2004 SDK, we not only shipped a day late and a dollar short (okay, it was actually $1.37, but who's counting), but we also kind of screwed over a contingent of our third party (not at all on purpose, of course). And that contigent would be people who don't use Gmax to model their scenery or aircraft. We basically dumped this binary blob of information into the .mdl file that was accessible only through a tool that was written in Gmax. So how does the person who wrote their own Flightsim export plug-in for say, Blender or Maya (or maybe even someone who wrote their very own 3d package) get that information out of the package they are using? Thus the poorly documented documentation on XML in .X files. So how does it work? Well here's a scenario:

Say you are using a non-Gmax software package (3ds Max, FSDS, Blender, Maya, XSI). Almost all (if not all) of these packages have a way of storing some sort of meta data within objects (we use the user-defined properties in Max or Gmax). This would be the ideal place to store an XML blob that contains attach point information. On export, given the proper format (see the article), one could conceivably spit out a Flight Simulator model that has some attach points in it by using properly encoded ASCII for the XML blob. (Oh, don't play coy with me, I know people have hacked into the memory streams and decoded our .X file format.)

So the purpose of the article is to help even the playing field for folks who might not be using Gmax to do their third party object creation.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    November 28, 2005
    Hi,

    Thanks for the info. I posted this blog link at the Freeflight site in case Louis Sinclair hadn't seen it yet, to allow attachpoints to be added to FSDS3, due soon:

    http://www.abacuspub.com/fsds3/

    Thanks again,