• Which the release of FS2020 we see an explosition of activity on the forun and of course we are very happy to see this. But having all questions about FS2020 in one forum becomes a bit messy. So therefore we would like to ask you all to use the following guidelines when posting your questions:

    • Tag FS2020 specific questions with the MSFS2020 tag.
    • Questions about making 3D assets can be posted in the 3D asset design forum. Either post them in the subforum of the modelling tool you use or in the general forum if they are general.
    • Questions about aircraft design can be posted in the Aircraft design forum
    • Questions about airport design can be posted in the FS2020 airport design forum. Once airport development tools have been updated for FS2020 you can post tool speciifc questions in the subforums of those tools as well of course.
    • Questions about terrain design can be posted in the FS2020 terrain design forum.
    • Questions about SimConnect can be posted in the SimConnect forum.

    Any other question that is not specific to an aspect of development or tool can be posted in the General chat forum.

    By following these guidelines we make sure that the forums remain easy to read for everybody and also that the right people can find your post to answer it.

“Helpful”AI

arno

arno

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I am working on implementing the FS2004 Unlimited Export tweaks into ModelConverterX. After I had the tweaks working for the external model, I was looking for some information on how to use different LOD in the internal model, since until now ModelConverterX only allowed exporting one LOD for the internal model.

So I used an AI chat bot to get some more information on how developers for FS2004 typically export their internal models, especially when they are using the Unlimited Export tweaks. Was the result of the AI chat bot helpful? Not really, it told me that I could use ModelConverterX to export a FS2004 internal model with the Unlimited Export tweaks. It even showed me a plan with various steps and settings to check and a CFG file where I could configure the different LODs for the internal model. It all looked quite convincing. But…..

  1. Since I am still implementing this feature, all of the ModelConverterX functionality that it talked about is non-existent and all options where made up as well. I only mentioned the Unlimited Export function in a blog post a week ago when I implemented the 4 mm weld limit workaround. So it is interesting how quickly the chat bot try to combine that information into this answer.
  2. The CGF files it showed for the LOD looked a bit like the model.cfg files that we can use in FS, but for FS2004 the internal and external model are in the same MDL file. So specifying your LOD in such a file was also made up (probably inspired by another game or engine that offers this).

Another nice example of an AI chat bot hallucinating and not really helping me to solve my question. In the end I found a few threads on FSDeveloper that contained much more useful information what the functionality I wanted to implement. So it turns out that fellow FS developers are a more trustworthy source of information.

By the way, I am making good progress with implementing the Unlimited Export function, so I hope to be able to push it into the development release soon.

Continue reading...
 
Ai is still lying at times. I've had some fun with having AI write code. Sometimes it's nonsense, but often I can switch between CoPilot, Gemini, Chatgpt, Claude, and Grok, and have one AI correct the code of another AI's poor coding. That's allowing me to code in python, a language I never studied, and still do not know it. :laughing:
 
For writing code I find the AI also quite useful, as long as it is the generic tasks that many examples are available from. Sometimes the code does not compile, in that case usually just asking the chat bot if it made a mistake since it does not compile generates some corrected code that does work.

But for niche things like FS2004 development, it seems that you need to be careful as it will just generate answers that look detailed, but are actually full of made up things. We have a nice saying for that in Dutch: to hear the clock chime, but to not know where the clapper is.
 
Hello Arno,

In the years 2010-2013, I worked on Bill’s document and with my friend Bernard, we had developed an operational version of ULE.
All this work has been documented (in French) and we have used it for some projects for FS2004 (see on my site http://frenchvfr.free.fr).

While reading your post, I searched on my disks for my backups from that period and I found all these works. I am sending you via MP a link to a downloadable archive (28 Mo). Of course the archive is complete: it contains the binaries, the various executables, the BAT files that we were using and the documentation (in French sorry) that we had written to serve us as a guide.

Hoping that all this can be used to implement this method in MCX
 
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Thanks, I'll check that information to see if I have missed something. Based on Bill's tutorial (and my experience with ASM files) I have a working implementation now already and I'm just finishing some last tests before I will put it in the development release.
 
You can't trust image search results either. Since PILOT'S released the P3Dv6 Boeing B-314 I'm seeing a whole load of new photographs of the interior from the 1930s. Only problem is, they're screenshots from the simulator manual...
 
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