Fairly new to PC's and Fltsims. Lots of questions.Q1. What is a "Mesh" and what does it mean to "declare" the mesh after downloading? (as instructed in Computerpilot Magazine Vol 8 Iss 3 for Italian mesh scenery) Q2. When downloading an Airport/Scenery either from a Freeware CD or the "net" I presume that the program just updates the existing airport/scenery within FS2002/FD2002 and that one actually has to plan or chart a flight that includes the airport/scenery in the plan? or can one just select the airport/scenery to start with, in which case how? Q3. On trying to view A.C.E.S.mpg, being a media file on Computerpilot Magazine Vol 8 Issue 3 I get a blank white page with a symbol in the top left corner being a square within is placed three smaller symbols namely a red square, a green circle and a blue triangle) What is this please? Thankyou. Dan

1. Mesh is the basic underlying scenery that sits on the earth. I assume that declaring the mesh means adding it to the scenery library menu. You can have all kinds of folders and files in your FS2002/FS2004 main folder that the simulation engine doesn't use, if it is not declared.2. If you install scenery and it is not located in the ..ADDON SCENCERYScenery and Texture folder, it must be added to the Scenery Library menu listing. From the Create a Flight menu, press Settings, Scenery Library.3. No idea!W. Sieffert

W. Sieffert, thankyou for your assistance. It would be great if everyone called a "spade a spade". If Mesh is scenery why don't we just call it scenery. If declaring means actually naming the addon in the Library why don't we just say so.:D Thanks again.Dan

Dan,You must realize we are an international community. Declaring may be perfectly normal to ones country's communications. A file uploaded and available in the library explains the installation of mesh - mesh_install.zip for this designers mesh scenery. This may be of some assistance to you in understanding how to install the mesh scenery. While the file is related to FS2002, it applies to FS2004.If you want more informatin, I recommend visiting http://www.microsoft.com/games/flightsimulator/ , downloads, and download the FS2002 and FS2004 SDKs. Also visit the MSFS Mesh Forum a little further down the forum tree.W. Sieffert

Well mesh is not the scenery per se. It is the land form that lies beneath the "texture" that you actually see as scenery. The texture itself is made up of various entities which collectively are called landclass. These entities can include but are not limited to forest, scrub, urban, industrial, and many other textures, but the elevations that you see actually represent the mesh below the textures.Cheers,Chris Porter:-outtaPerthWestern AustraliaMy "Around the World 4" flight pagehttp://members.iinet.net.au/~portercbp/fly...e%20World_4.htm

I agree that there are terms which are not well-defined. Here is my attempt. I'm not saying I'm right, or this is best, just that it helps me in visualizing the sim world.Scenery. Scenery is everything that is rendered and displayed on the computer monitor. Note that scenery elements often have characteristics which affect other parts of the sim (example: VORs affect aircraft radio navigational instruments.) I divide scenery into two types: variable and fixed.Variable scenery. Scenery not tied to earth position (when the program files are compiled). Includes aircraft (own aircraft and AI), weather, and celestial objects. I don't discuss this here.Fixed scenery. Scenery tied to earth surface. As near as I can tell, the fixed scenery can be divided into three subtypes: terrain, objects, and effects. I don't discuss effects here.Terrain. Terrain is defined in a spherical coordinate system: lat, long, and alt. For display, terrain is projected onto the tangent plane with altitude information displayed as "3D". To facilitate display, the sim subdivides terrain into a succession of quads, each covering a smaller area of earth surface and allowing higher resolution. These quads are refered to as "Level of Detail" or LOD. All LOD quads have a fixed position on the earth's surface (which can be computed without reference to the sim).Terrain is defined by its 3D wireframe altitude model (termed "mesh") and textures which are applied to the mesh/wireframe to create the rendered final product. The key is that the textures conform to the wireframe mesh.Mesh. Mesh consists of altitude samples which in turn define the endpoints of triangles as part of the 3D drawing algorithms within the sim. These samples are provided at regular intervals and collected within the standard LOD quads which define terrain. They can be visualized as a two-dimensional array or equivalently, as rasterized. Mesh can be provided at various LOD levels, with LOD5 generally considered the the "course" granularity, and LOD10 "fine" (note: higher LOD number, higher the resolution). In addition to the mesh, there is a posibility for additional polygons (that is, not raster data) to override the mesh. Most important is the "flatten", which which forces the wireframe to assume a given altitude everywhere within the polygon.Terrain Texture. terrain texture are the bitmaps which give the terrain its "look and feel". The basic textures are generic and are rasterized, like the mesh. There is a distinction, in that each terrain texture covers exactly 1 LOD13 quad. To determine which texture bitmap to display in any particular location, the sim uses yet another rastorized data set, called "waterclass" and "landclass". Each data point in these arrays defines the generic texture to display in the corresponding LOD13 quad. (By virtue of the 256x256 array size, these class files are defined at LOD5).Texture Polygons. The sim allows the generic terrain textures to be "overlayed" with other textures, defined by polygons (that is, vectorized). One type of these, called "Land Water Mask or LWM does not have any texture of its own; rather is determines whether the sim should use the generic water class texture or land class texture. The remaining texture polys or VTP do have their own texture bitmaps, and can be used to create shorelines, rivers, roads, and custom features (such as photo-real). Analagous to the situation of mesh and flatten polys, it is possible to define "exclude" polygons which prevent the display of the texture polygons.Leaving the definition of terrain, the other pirmary part of the fixed scenery are objects. Objects are defined in a 3-dimensional Cartesion "design space" x-y-z. This allows the creation of buildings, trees, and such in 3D modeling tools such as GMax. These objects consist of form (wireframe) data and textures. Completed objects are then tied to the sim earth model by specifying the location and rotation of the xyz coordinates within the lat-long-alt world. This also allows objects to be defined in libaries, so they can be reused. The objects can be placed explicitly, but the sim also allows landclass to trigger the dynamic placement of objects called "autogen".scott s..