With all the meshes available, both free and payware, No one has released any revised shore lines for lakes or Oceans that I know of. I am not a scenery editor and don't know much about it, but am just curious as to what is it about MSFS that seems to make it so difficult to get accuarate shore lines. All Meshes have deep cliffs and cuts along water. What would it take for a vendor to use satellite data to do revise this. Any thoughts?

Hi John:I'm sure others mesh and coastline designers (where's Slartibartfast?) have things to add but I'll start with what I know.Technically, making new shorelines isn't difficult (thanks to the volunteer efforts of our utility programmers!), though this planet does have a LOT of shorelines ;-)More problematic is the fact that making more accurate shorelines doesn't necessarily help with the unsightly cliffs. That's because the default Land-Water masks come with a hard-coded "flatten switch" (i.e., setting ocean water to zero and lakes to their correct elevation) that cannot be undone, at least we don't know how (other than deleting thousands of square km of coastline/lake data). In other words, even if your new shoreline extends farther out and it's all nice and curvy, FS will keep on displaying the default lake/ocean surface, albeit without water.Here's an example of a reworked coastline (courtesy of Harvey Janszen): note the cliffs in the bottom picture - those are due to the still-active default flatten switch that prevents the add-on mesh from extending to the tru coastline.http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/41848.jpgAs you can imagine that puts a bit of a damper on the tedious work of digitizing a more accurate shoreline. There are work-arounds but they are even more tedious and thus not widely used.However, part of the problem is not the shoreline's fault. Based on my experience, there is a second basic problems that prevents good fit between the default FS linework (coasts, lakes, rivers) and add-on meshes:In almost any places and with most add-on meshes there are systematic displacements in a specific direction (say NW) of the mesh relative to the coastlines. If you fly or slew across such an area you'll notice that most cliffs are on S and E shores of lakes and oceans. The higher the resolution of the add-on mesh, the more pronounced this issue becomes. The image below shows a drastic example where the mesh is shifted to the North (left) relative to the coastline, essentially displacing the inlet from its proper basin into the side of the mountain. The reason for this offset can be either a mistake by the mesh designer or, more likely, a problem with the placement of the default FS data. In either case, an appropriate adjustment can be made at the time of the mesh compilation (and only then!!!) to minimize the mismatch. http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/41850.jpgMy final image shows an area in TMFViewer, with shorelines on top of an accurately placed add-on mesh. Again, note the systematic displacement, particularly around the islands. If the mesh designer sees an offset like this, he/she can adjust the position of the mesh to make it match better with the FS data. It's not a perfect solution (the displacement is not always consistent in direction or extent) but it can provide a vast improvement.Unfortunately, not many mesh designers chose to take this additional step and instead compile the terrain as is. http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/41852.jpgHope this wasn't too confusing...Cheers, Holger

Thanks taking the time to explain this. It is very interesting. Now I know why things look the way they do with-add on mesh sceneries. I guess we can hope that Microsoft provides more accurate meshes and shorelines in their next release of FS. Thanks!