Debugging the errors with the aircraft converter

    Hello,

    I am currently creating a new plane for Aerofly FS 2. I read the documentation about converting an aircraft and followed the different tutorials that are available (those are great, by the way !). However, when I convert the 3D model that I have exported in the tgi format, the aircraft converter is stuck saying "loading texture xxx".

    This is not a big deal. The only real problem is that I couldn't find any explanation of why it doesn't work in the log files (both in the aircraft converter directory, and in the aircarft directory). This means I cannot work on solving the problem, since I don't actually know where the problem is.

    Does anyone has an idea of why the aircraft converter would be stuck loading textures ? If not, could you at least tell me where I can find more debugging information about the conversion errors ?

    Thank you for your help, cheers !

    Antoine Brunner

    Quote from larrylynx

    Is the texture in the correct format, I always use a BMP and perhaps the most obvious, is that texture in the intermediate folder

    Steve

    Thank you for your answer !

    The textures are in PNG format. According to the documentation, this is supported, right ? They're all located in the folder where the TMC and TMD files (that's what you call the intermediate folder, if I understood right).

    There are 2 error logs you can look at

    Report.txt which will be in the intermediate folder ( this is the conversion report)

    TM.Log this will be in your documents folder ( this is when the sim runs and finds a problem) BIG RED CUBE

    < and > errors are normally picked up in TM.Log when the sim fails to load the aircraft and you see the big red cube. Missing [ and ] can often go un-noticed.

    As I said, the usual cause is missing textures and the failure to have them in the intermediate folder or incorrectly assigned. For some reason I can never get the display_source_light to convert so I normally end up placing it in the DR400 and converting from there.

    Although you can use png better to stick with bmp.

    I normally have a folder where all the modelling stuff goes that max creates, I make a texture folder in that folder. I normally have the export files also go in this texture folder. I then copy all those files in the texture folder to another folder on the hard disk and that is where the convert takes place. When you get into TMD editing I edit the "live" one in the documents folder. If I need to convert again after making modelling or texture changes I copy this live file to the intermediate folder. The converter will not let you do the convert unless the intermediate tmd is the same as the live tmd.

    So in my case

    (Main working folder )

    ah64a folder with

    _texture ( _ means its always at the top of the folder)

    scenes

    docs

    photos

    uv

    etc etc

    (intermediate folder)

    called apache with all the textures ( just bmp not psd files) and model export files (3 or maybe 2 as I have an extra txt file for debugging ), aircraft.tmc, model.tmc, controls.tmd and aircraft.tmd

    Do remember lowercase for all folders and texture file names

    Steve

    I had a similar problem recently with aircraft converter stuck on loading texture... It failed to reach the end until I used a copy of the DR400.tmd from which I removed all graphics sections except the fuselage, wings and wheels sections.

    Best, Sylvain