Let me add that the FSGenesis mesh is an excellent product for use worldwide. What mesh does is it makes the sim look like the real world. In other words, if you put your plane in a place you know well, the surrounding hills, mountains, valleys and elevations will look familiar to you. In some of the default mesh in FSX, especially outside of the U.S., the rounded off hills do not look at all like real world.The issue of airport plateaus and, worse, holes is a drawback to using real world elevations. FSX has wrong elevation data on a number of airports, particularly outside of the U.S. This is compounded by MS's frustrating unwillingness to allow runways to conform to the underlying mesh terrain. Instead they must be perfectly flat (and unrealistic) at a specified altitude, which means that with real mesh one end of the runway or the other (or both) is going to have a cliff associated with it in landscape which is not flat. Justin is working on fixing these transitions from the mesh to the airports, but with 24,000+ airports, it is a slow process to do them individually.Just think how much easier this all would have been if the runways automatically conformed to the terrain they were placed on! So, we make the best of what we have, and I personally believe detailed mesh adds a lot to the experience.You are right that better terrain mesh doesn't make much difference at the flight levels, and if that is most of your flying (major airport to FL310 to major airport), then detailed mesh won't change that experience as much.Ben

Now that we are broadening the topic, mesh and textures are two totally different things. Like bread and butter, they go together, but they are distinct and different. All a mesh does is provide three-dimensional data for the polygonal model of the Earth. The terrain is based on textures, which is different. "Desertification" doesn't have to do with altitude in FSX, it has to do with landclass. Certainly, FSX uses outdated, incorrect, or oversimplified data for both mesh and landclass, which results in rounded mountains in some parts of the world, and a great number of inappropriate deserts. The only parts of FSX where mesh directly affects landclass, as far as I know, are steep mountain slopes and water (although that goes to waterclass files). Landclass data is much different from mesh data, in that landclass is algorythmic, and can be stored in a much smaller file than mesh. A global landclass file does not need a half dozen DVD's worth of storage space, whereas a good mesh can be require that space or more.Landclass has a similar downside to mesh, though, in that if you are covering a continental (or larger) area, there are bound to be errors that ultimately need to be corrected by hand. Fortunately, it's a lot easier for the average user to correct a landlclass error on their own than a mesh error. Jeff ShylukSenior Staff ReviewerAVSIM