The new beta of the AC3D export plugin is posted here. There are a bunch of bug fixes, but the two big ones are:

Texture paths are exported without relative directories. This was a new “feature” in the first beta, but virtually everyone said that exporting relative paths was both confusing and annoying. The plugin is now back the way it used to be. (If you need a relative path, there is a “prefix” path that you can specify in the preferences that will be prepended before all textures.)

The popup menu for datarefs has been replaced by a combo-box. This has three advantages:

  1. The popup can be built a lot faster.
  2. You can type custom datarefs into the combo box.
  3. It doesn’t crash.

Here’s a tip: if you type a part of a dataref into the combo box and then open it, only the matching datarefs are shown. Try typing “flightmodel” into the combo box and then opening it.

“Directories” of datarefs are shown first. So from flightmodel you can pick sim/flightmodel/position and then re-click. Now all of the position datarefs are shown. In this way you can navigate through all datarefs.

You can also use wild-cards in the combo-box. If you search for sim/flightmodel*x you will find all of the datarefs beginning with sim/flightmodel and ending with x. Note that when you use * your pattern must match the entire dataref.

(To search for all datarefs containing flightmodel and local with some text between them, you cannot just use flightmodel*local. You need to use *flightmodel*local*.)

About Ben Supnik

Ben is a software engineer who works on X-Plane; he spends most of his days drinking coffee and swearing at the computer -- sometimes at the same time.