Genesis Galaxy member!

[CanadaOne 36]

:-sun1 Bit the bullet, let loose with the VISA, and "Yeah baby!"I've already got five or six sets of Genesis payware covering the west coast from California up to BC and Alaska, and all their free stuff, but I shelled out the $100 and now I get the whole catalog to DL at my leisure over the next three years and they're sending me two sets of DVDs to cover the whole world in FS9 & FSX. I feel like a kid in a candy store.It seems very expensive, and maybe it is, but for us flight-heads...Good thing I just got another HD. I think all that mesh is 15GB+. I think I'm going to have to do fresh install of FS9 when the disks get here. Hit that sucker with all the mesh, lay on the GE Pro, the UT and FE, then break out my Shockwave Spitfire and check out the scenery.Fun - fun - fun.

[Mike_CFII_MEL 789]

Hi,I've been a member for some time, IMHO - its a great baragin. I think if you were going to spend $100.00, you should have spent the extra fifty and got a lifetime membership.Mike

[CanadaOne 36]

"I think if you were going to spend $100.00, you should have spent the extra fifty and got a lifetime membership."Now don't go making me feel bad about myself. I've been having a very nice day so far.Besides, that extra $50 buys me a lovely bottle of bourbon to nip at while I'm flying low and slow with my music in the backround.

[Guest neslesman]

I'm one of those, you can never get enough mesh, kind of people. I get the world covered in 76M and then go and cover N.America, France and Britain in 38M and 19 and 10M, then the Alps and Italy and Austria and then the Himalayas and Catalonia and then............I'm llke a woman buying shoes and am going to need a mesh dedicated HD. BTW I keep all my mesh and photoreal sceneries, over 30Gb., on a separate drive from FS9. I give it one layer of compression with just Windows default compression and I doubt it slows things one iota. There is a nice gain however in running that mesh and photoreal sceneries on that fast new system hard drive rather than the FS9 drive.I am also convinced that I'm benefitting from getting O&O Defrag where I defrag and file alphabetically those scenery and mesh files on the outside portion of the drive. eg. A_Alaska38MMesh, A_Yukon38MMesh, etc, etc.). I have no empirical data to illustrate but I do know for sure that some of that slower scenery building I used to see off in the distance I now have a fast smooth scenery build that seldom even gives me those different coloured square acreages on the water, it just dissapears nicely into the horizon.

[CanadaOne 36]

Neslesman,How do you keep all your mesh apart from your FS9 folder and still make it work? Sounds interesting.As for the mesh coverage, I'm loving it. I've got some places, like B.C. layered with 153, 76, and 38 meter mesh. Looks great from a distance and gives a lovely smooth transition as you approach. Some places, like the Grand Tetons, can have 306, 153, 76, 38, and 9 meter mesh. I'm loading up all of that today. Really looking forward to that first flight seeing all the transitions in detail. Great stuff.To anyone who doesn't have it, I can't recommend the Genesis mesh highly enough. Aside from GE Pro, there's no other add-on that offers as much immersion and as much fun.

[Guest DK8290]

"How do you keep all your mesh apart from your FS9 folder and still make it work?"I just have it all on the same drive as FS2004 but not inside the FS2004 folder. I have all the files inside a "scenery" folder. Then in FS2004 and also in FSX , I add it to the scenery library (needs to be in a folder called 'scenery' to be accessed by the library . This way I have one copy used for both FSX and FS2004. So on my setup, my mesh files are at; F:FSgenesis_meshscenery

[CanadaOne 36]

Does this give you faster loading of the scenery in-flight?

[Guest DK8290]

I don't know really. As far as my FS2004 is concerned, the mesh and the rest of the installation is on the same drive. For FSX, the sim intsallation is on another drive and it accesses the mesh from the same drive as fs2004. Some people think this could be faster access since the sim could be accessing the mesh faster from another drive while doing something else on the drive that the sim files are installed. I don't know if there is a different.My FS2004 doesn't have any issues with mesh loading on-the-fly that I can see. I just did this to save disk space so I wouldn't need to copy them over to FSX too.

[Guest neslesman]

"Neslesman,How do you keep all your mesh apart from your FS9 folder and still make it work? Sounds interesting"I think your question has been somewhat answered but you can keep mesh or any scenery anywhere you want on your computer as long as it is added correctly to the scenery library which identifies it's location. My theory, and many others, is that spreading the work load over two or more drives should speed up the loading. My own anectodotal experience would seem to confirm that.I keep my mesh and mega/photo sceneries on my main sytem (non FS9) drive as close to the surface as possible (meaning not buried three or four levels down in a directory) hence my sytem drive © has about two dozen entries like C:A_76M Mesh N.A. , C:A_MegaScenery PNW, C:A_BC Corillera 38M Mesh etc. Preceeding everything with the "A_ means that it's all bunched together on the drive and subsequently the drive will do less physical searching. That is in conjuction with O&O Defragment which is set up to place files alphabetically on the drive with "A" being on the outside of the drive, hence fastest, part of the drive. One layer of compression on those files doesn't seem to slow things down at all and saves a bit of drive space at the same time.As for the effectiveness of the alphabetical defrag and the naming of the mesh files as I have them, I can't say definitely if it's effective one way or another except to say that things seem to be smoother and faster than before I changed them over and that it seems logical. Spreading the load over two or more drives is definitely, IMO, an improvement.

[HUSSAR 272]

>"Neslesman,>>How do you keep all your mesh apart from your FS9 folder and>still make it work? Sounds interesting">>I think your question has been somewhat answered but you can>keep mesh or any scenery anywhere you want on your computer as>long as it is added correctly to the scenery library which>identifies it's location. My theory, and many others, is that>spreading the work load over two or more drives should speed>up the loading. My own anectodotal experience would seem to>confirm that.>>I keep my mesh and mega/photo sceneries on my main sytem (non>FS9) drive as close to the surface as possible (meaning not>buried three or four levels down in a directory) hence my>sytem drive © has about two dozen entries like C:A_76M Mesh>N.A. , C:A_MegaScenery PNW, C:A_BC Corillera 38M Mesh etc. >Preceeding everything with the "A_ means that it's all bunched>together on the drive and subsequently the drive will do less>physical searching. That is in conjuction with O&O Defragment>which is set up to place files alphabetically on the drive>with "A" being on the outside of the drive, hence fastest,>part of the drive. One layer of compression on those files>doesn't seem to slow things down at all and saves a bit of>drive space at the same time.>>As for the effectiveness of the alphabetical defrag and the>naming of the mesh files as I have them, I can't say>definitely if it's effective one way or another except to say>that things seem to be smoother and faster than before I>changed them over and that it seems logical. Spreading the>load over two or more drives is definitely, IMO, an>improvement.Hi,So one can place addon scenery on a different drive as long as you make the scenery "look" for its files in the right place huh? Ok I am going to give that a try... now my question is, will it improve performance while in flight, perhaps decreasing stutters or does it just quicken the load up time of scenery before flight?Thanks,

[Guest neslesman]

It should help in flight as well as for initial loading. That certainly seems to be the consensus that I've seen in discussions but I have no statistical evidence to prove it. I can say however that my installation is smooth as butter but there were many tweaks along the way that lead to that. I had never seen a computer game or flight sim prior to 8 months ago so much of this is new to me.You will find a fair bit of discussion on this in the Hardware sub forum (because it involves hard drives) that is now part of the FSX discussion area. That hadware sub forum used to be up front for all us FS9ers before FSX came along, but now it's a conscious effort to go seek it out if you aren't reading the FSX stuff.