About beta 5

Beta 5 is in early development and not available for download at the moment...

It will look a little different but will 'work' almost the same. The aim is to optimize it for FS2002. In other words it will feature new (and faster) commands such as:

VertexList()
DrawTriList()
MaterialList()
TextureList()
SetMaterial()

LOD (levels of detail) will be improved. It will be possible to draw polygons and lines using a bezier tool. Bezier outlines are curved outlines where you only define a few points. In other words, it will make the design of rounded polygons and taxiway lines way easier. The advantage with such bezier outlines is that LODs can be computed very accurately and efficiently.

GroundMaker will also support an accurate Direct3D mode. And for those of you who still use FS2000, GroundMaker will be backwards compatible bu remember that some material settings will be ignored.

Latest screenshots

Here is a screenshot of the user interface. The menu and toolbar are still missing at the moment.

I'm experimenting with a new material tool. Instead of setting texture, texture effects, color and transparency for every shape you define a couple of surface properties (materials) once and assign them to your shapes. This saves a lot of time and it is possible to change the surface properties for multiple shapes at once. Imagine you just figured out you would like to add a snow effect to your taxiway polygons. Simply enable the snow feature on the taxiway concrete material  and there you go!

(c) 2001-2003 Vincent Koch