Christian Stock's new TMF Macros

[rhumbaflappy 113]

Hi all.Christian Stock's new TMF macros show the great promise for FS2002 style decals and flattens. Part of Christian's philosophy is to free himself from SCASM or BGLC, and write code that may be directly assembled from MASM... assembly language coding.I didn't look forward to having to learn MASM, and the problems with gathering the basic tools.While looking at the BGLC code with a hex editor, I noticed the same include files needed by MASM were already inside BGLC. All that was missing, was the new TMFmacros.inc and the Scenery.inc that Christian supplied with his "nzrc.zip" file, available here at AVSIM. So, I added the following lines to the start of Christian's "NZRC_???.txt" files: include Scenery.inc include TMFmacros.incThis includes the INC files during compilation of the BGLs.In the same folder, I now had Christian's "NZRC_???.txt" files, the new TMFmacros.inc and the Scenery.inc macro files, BGLC.exe, txt2asm.exe.I then 'drag-n-dropped' each TXT file onto "txt2asm.exe" (supplied by Christian). I then 'drag-n-dropped' the resulting ASM files onto "BGLC.exe" ( the new version supplied by Microsoft with the FS2002 Special Effects SDK ). The resulting BGL files may be placed into a scenery folder structure like any other scenery BGLs. It works.So, we can follow along with some of Christian's experiments, while still using the convenience of BGLC.

[arno 1]

Humm, very interesting. Have had a little struggle trying to set up MAAM (and gave it up for a while). This makes it a lot easier. Thanks :DArnoMember NL2000 Teamhttp://home.wanadoo.nl/arno.gerretsen

[rhumbaflappy 113]

Hi arno.Yes, it's lots easier to understand. To my knowledge, BGLC is basically MASM with some FS macros added. I understand that Christian is worried about incompatabilities with future versions of FS, if Microsoft abandons the BGL coding in the future. But perhaps we can simply add new macros.A caution about the AFD example. It may well need MASM to compile correctly, as Christian states. It compiled under BGLC for me, but after adding my BGLC-compiled Ryan's Creek AFD to CFS2, I was blocked from adding any more AFD entries! Fortunately, we have other tools to create AFD BGLs, so we still don't need to be tied to MASM (just yet).Christian may be right in moving towards MASM development, but it's hard to learn new techniques, with new tools... just ask anyone about GMAX. :)Then require the GMAX users to gather snips of code from the internet to be able to compile GMAX to begin with! It's too bad that Microsoft doesn't gather all the parts for MASM in one spot, to help out assembly coders. :-eek Bravo, Christian, for sharing the knowledge. Maybe we can get some other TMF experiments going using your knowledge and macros.

[Guest christian]

Yes, that's my setup :)I think I may have caused a misunderstanding here. MASM and BGLC are indeed the same thing. If you know BGLC you need everything to use MASM to create bgls. The difference though is that with MASM you can create new macros (like I did with the TMF macros).The only difference is that BGLC has the include files compiled into the bglc.exe. I think George found out that you still can use BGLC even with new external include files. I have never tried it and would be not certain what happens if you use external include files. That's why I switched over to MASM. But seriously, if you know BGLC switching to MASM is not a big hassle.Cheers, Christian

[rhumbaflappy 113]

Hi Christian.So far, it appears the hex code BGL produced by the new BGLC.exe (using the "include" commands) is identical to your example code.And the 'drag-n-drop' feature is quick and convenient.