Tuesday, December 20, 2005

DSF2Text - Just a Link in the Chain

"Five long years I thought you were my man
But I found out I'm just a link in your chain"
-- Aretha Franklin, Chain of Fools
A new version of DSF2Text is out, one that works with the global scenery, and I have already seen authors adding custom objects to the global scenery. Great! I have also received some emails from users having trouble with DSF2Text. Please keep this in mind before you despair:

DSF2Text is designed to be a link in a chain of scenery editing tools; its primary audience is programmers who can feed their program's text files into DSF2Text to generate final DSF files. I never intended to have people editing 45 MB text files to make scenery; the tutorial on how to add objects to DSFs is really a hack.

Please bear with us; in the next few weeks I hope to unveil some new technologies and tools that will be much easier and faster to use. In the meantime if you can get DSF2Text to work great, but if not, please do not worry; better things are on the way.

(As a side note, if you are working on payware X-Plane scenery and are modifying our DSFs, please contact me by email; the X-Plane EULA allows you to make derived freeware from our artwork, but not payware. The new overlay DSFs will allow you to create DFSs that are totally your own.)

1 comment:

Benjamin Supnik said...

Theo, I agree! DSF2Text in its current form is real hard to use (although the new one might help). Once we have overlays I think you'll find your work will be a lot easier.