Recent content by Blake

I think VC development is a lot of fun, but can be tricky. I'm not aware of any best practices, or ways to make it easier. DG is a good place to look, but that has been structured to generalize a lot of the functionality. If you don't need that it is overkill. Still, it is a working sample...

Yes, PM me your file, I'll take a look. Does not appear to be related to these changes, but you never know. As for rolling back, you should be able to just remove the current version (the Remove button in preferences/add on/Orbiter Mesh Tools). Then select the Install... button at the top of...

Latest This should clean up the naming issue for the C++ include files. I've done some cursory testing, so if you find issues let me know.

Yea, there are times you cannot avoid the .0xx issue easily. I'll take a closer look at this and maybe at least provide a way to turn off the automatic conversion of . to _ if needed. Thanks for the input.

This is an issue I'm aware of, and have run into often. Blender, when you duplicate an object, will append the .001 to the object name. the '.' is invalid in C++ as an identifier, so you end up with a compiler error. I thought I at one point had added (or intended to add) code to just convert...

For a VC? In Blender you will have a plane that represents the HUD or MFD surface, unwrap that and assign it a texture. SR-71R does this, and uses the same texture where the VC controls are laid out. In Blender you will see that texture on that plane, but you don't see it at runtime--just...

In the project properties, 'Code Generation/Runtime Libarary', pick one of the /MT (not /MD) options. That should compile the runtime into the DLL and avoid the need for the user to install the runtime libraries independently. For Orbiter add ons /MT (static library) is generally safe. For...

When installing VC 2022 Community (as Urwumpe said) make sure to include the Desktop Development with C++. That should include everything you need. You should not need older version of MSVC unless you are building some add-in that requires it. What I then do is open the ShuttlePB.sln from...

A mesh file is comprised of 'objects' or 'groups' that are defined in the mesh. The order they exist in the file is the order they will render in Orbiter. Also, a 'triangle' only has one side that will ever be visible to the renderer, a two-sided triangle is just two triangles. So, if you...

In Orbiter, the interior needs to be a separate object from the exterior (the object with the window). For example, if you want to see the pilot through the canopy window, the pilot is a separate object from the canopy, and must be sorted so that it comes before the canopy window in the mesh...

By the way, I can recommend this guy for some great Blender tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/@grabbitt This is a good series of his for beginners: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLn3ukorJv4vvv3ZpWJYvV5Tmvo7ISO-NN

Probably not, if that is working for you. A lot of the work in Blender is in areas we don't much care about for Orbiter work. Still, I usually work with the latest that will work with the plugin. For now that is 4.0. I do notice that 4.0 is slower to open on my machine, so there is that.

Blender 4.1 Heads Up! Blender 4.1 changes how smoothing and normals work in a way that breaks the orbiter mesh plugin. For now just use Blender 4.0. I'm seeing some complaints about this change on the internet, so the plan for now is to wait for a version 4.1.1 or .2 to see how it shakes out.

Google for 'blender low poly' or 'game asset' tutorials. I won't vouch for the quality of any of them, but it will give you some ideas on getting started using Blender for that type of work you would do for Orbiter.

I assume you are placing an 'Empty' object at the coordinates in your VC mesh where the button will be and then asking Blender to write that location to the header file. Blender can get funny with transforms, and its possible they have not really moved to where they belong. Click on them and...