I just made a page that shows the effects of LOD and TERRAIN_MAX_VERTEX_LEVEL rather clearly. I used 1/9" SDDS elevation data in the Seattle area to get maximum source resolution, and 3D analyzer to force FS9 to run in wireframe so that the actual polygons would be obvious. The results I came up with were that TMVL's above 21 didn't have any visible effect, and 21 only changed texturing at close range. 20 did significantly increase the polygon count over 19 and thus visible terrain resolution. Surprisingly, there's NO difference between LOD 10,11,or 12 meshes as far as elevation detail was concerned, at least with the terrain detail slider at max (I didn't feel like adding another variable to the test and spending that much more time doing this. :)) The only difference between LOD 11 and 12 was that 12 wasn't rendered at all at a TMVL of 19, while at 20 or 21 it was only rendered very near to the viewpoint. The only difference between LOD 10 and 11 was near viewpoint texturing at LOD 21, the elevation detail was identical. In the pictures the LOD 10 mesh appears to have a nearer far clipping point, but that was just because the small 1/9" source area didn't fit as well into the LOD 10 mesh.There's 1.70 megs of jpegs here, all 1024x768...http://members.cox.net/rotareneg/lod.html

Hi,Thanks for sharing this information! As this is rather technical information bE sure to publish this (also) into the scenery/mesh design forum overhere. Rob "Holland&Holland" de Vries http://www.emotipad.com/emoticons/Flying.gif"To go up, pull the stick back. To go down, pull the stick back harder"

Hi,Thanks! Your results confirm information on my website: www.fs-traveler.comThe radius of LOD12 mesh is only about 8 nm from the aircraft. You can confirm this and discover many other interesting aspects of mesh behavior by experimenting with some artificial terrain I've created for Maui. (about 100kb download)www.fs-traveler.com/cgi-bin/maui-lod-test.zipIt is quite interesting to compare the differences between FS2002 and FS2004.Steve