I believe I have the answer on how to get better than HVIEW displays 
of you FSD objects.  This may be old hat for some of you out there, 
but its news to me, so I thought I would share my experience.

As some of you know, using HVIEW to display your object pretty much 
cancels out any attempt to make a screen grab, thus you are left with 
the alternative of using the shape viewer in the FST Shape Editor.  
Problem there is that it does not look half as good as in HVIEW 
because of the 16 color shading.  Also the shape editor puts nasty 
hard lines between every poly, so your shape looks a bit more 
primative than it should.

SOLUTION:

I was thrilled to download Bryan McNett's little piece of programming 
genius, a neat little conversion program called <A 
HREF="http://www.mcnett.org/fst/incoming/fsd2vrml.exe">FSD2VRML.EXE</A
>.  The hyper-link above should work or Get this thing at his FST 
Megasite below:

http://www.mcnett.org/fst/incoming/fsd2vrml.exe

Right.  This neat little DOS command line jobber will turn you FSD 
into a WRL file.  To find the correct syntax, simply type FSD2VRML.  
Its easy, you just need the FSD file you wish to covert and a color 
(*.FCD) file.  The command line goes something like this:

FSD2VRML FILENAME.FSD COLFILE.FCD OUTPUT.WRL

What's created is an output VRML 2.0 file that can be viewer with a 
browser that has VRML ability.  Now, I have IE5 with the VRML plug 
in, I'm not sure if I downloaded it from M/S or if its built right 
into IE5 (if you don't have it you can get it for free at the MS site.  At any rate, You can simply open the output file you 
create with the *.WRL extension locally... or it can stand alone as a 
hyper-link.  Try the link below...

<A HREF="http://home.earthlink.net/~michealey/jup2.wrl">See the 
Jupiter 2 WRL file</A>

What you should get is my Jupiter II FSD displayed in your brower's 
window with controls along the left side and bottom.  The controls 
let you move around and move the object.

Okay, now here is where I had trouble.  When I first tried to view a 
WRL file with IE5, the bloody object kept moving about on its own.  
It would not stay on the screen and flickered about.  I was about to 
give up when I touched my joystick...  Hmmmm, it seems the VRML plug 
in within IE5 was taking input from the joystick as well as the 
mouse.  I went to the Windows/setting/control panel/joystick folder 
and recalibrated the joystick...  Poof, when I tried to view the WRL 
file again, the controls worked perfect...  I could get my Jupiter II 
into a perfect angle for a screen grab (and it stayed there).  For a Windows screen grab I use the great display program <A 
HREF="http://www.photodex.com">CPIC</A>.  With CPIC, you just keep it 
running and hit the Print Screen key.  Well, just have a look at the 
result below:

<A HREF="http://home.earthlink.net/~michealey/j2fsd.jpg">Jupiter II 
FSD</A>.  Now that's a grab good enough for my website!

So, I think this is a nice solution...and thanks so much to Bryan for 
writing FSD2VRML. I hope you can benefit from my experience and that I wrote all the hyper-links above right.  Heh heh.

Kind Regards,

Mic.


P.S., I should keep the files on the above links for a couple of months.. 

