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Tools are better than thumbs.

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I'm probably coming late to the party here, but there's some really cool stuff over at SceneryDesign.org, a nice little site put together by 3rd party scenery gurus Arno and Nick.  It's got tools, documented formats and a wiki for all of your Flight Simulator scenery creation needs. 

In some ways, seeing these sites really depresses me.  I think it's an amazing thing for Flight Simulator and the community, but I just wish we had all those tools in house.  I'll be honest, for a very long time, the ACES group was lousy with tools.  And I mean ABSOLUTELY LOUSY!!!  When given the choice between creating a tool to make people's lives easier and implementing a feature, we always chose the feature.  This led to a rather nonrobust toolset, and anyone who creates add-on scenery can attest to that.  However, there's just no way to create a game or simulator to today's standards without a really robust toolset.  And I think we're finally starting to get it here.  We now have a dedicated tools group within ACES that are making some really cool things happen for us.  I'm hoping that this gets carried over into any SDK releases we do in the future.

There's a neat link to Jim Keir's LWMViewer2 on Scenery Design.  A great concept, being able to open a scenery file from FS2004 and view it easily and edit it no less.  I must admit, our very own model viewer is a bit clumsy and not at all optimized for quickly and easily viewing models.  It's called Flight Simulator.  Hey Jim, we do have a tools position open on the Flight Simulator team. [;)]

Comments

  • Anonymous
    October 19, 2005
    Thanks for mentioning the site Adrian! Come visit often!

    Arno is the brains... I am simply in "marketing" :) Without Arno's tools and help, a lot of us scenery designers would not know where to start..

    Three cheers......
  • Anonymous
    October 19, 2005
    Speaking of tools...

    Here are a few that I find essential:

    Traffic Tools - Lee Swordy
    AFCAD - Lee Swordy
    imagetool - MS :-)

    Best,

    Owen

  • Anonymous
    October 19, 2005
    Thanks Adrian, really nice to read this.

    I always thought that the FS team had much better tools than those created by the different freeware authors.

    Or maybe it only means that we freeware authors are more lazy and try to automate as much as we can :).