Hi all,

 

I see ad's about scenery, and I'm a little, a lot, confused about scenery terms, such as, landclass, and mesh. I think mesh concerns the shape of the surface, but the term "landclass", I don't get?

 

Can someone explain to me, just what it is. I was looking at a "Scenery Tech - Africa landclass v1.0", and at looking at the images, it looked like it added trees, rivers, etc. I thought landclass was simular to mesh?

 

Any info will help me greatly, thank you,

 

Larry

 

ps, what is the best brand to buy of these?

Mesh = Hills

Landclass = Where are towns, cities, industrial areas, heavily populated residential areas, lighly populated residential areas, Areas with lots of commercial business buildings, Areas with mostly just houses, forest, grassland, grassland with small pockets of light shrubbery, industrial farms, small subsistence farms, etc.

 

These areas will be given a texture. Unlike photoreal scenery, there are some generic textures that are filled in for these types of areas. The landclass tells the simulator where to put these textures, so that cities and towns exist where they should be at, and so you don't get a big forest where there should be a city.

 

Landclass instead of photoreal means that less resources are required to render, so there is less Virtual Addressing space used, less ram used, and less hard disk space used. For instance, NL2000 is a photoreal scenery and it is about 25 gigabytes in size, as every square metre has a pixel of texture. A landclass can still look very detailed (Orbx FTX regions are a landclass based scenery) but instead of one pixel for every metre or whatever the resolution, there is a set of textures that can be repeated to make the landscape look plausable, however instead of one small country taking 25 gigabytes, you can do a whole continent in less than 1 gigabyte.

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Great explanation Hopskip!!!!

 

I wondered about this in the past too. For a pictured explanation I found orbx forum had a good one.

 

Here is the link: http://www.orbxsystems.com/forum/topic/61929-ftx-global-what-is-it-all-about/

I was going to add to the description that Trent had given you, but then I recalled seeing a few decent graphics over on the Orbx forums.  I couldn't find both of them, and the one I couldn't find goes into greater detail that's specific to the various Orbx products, whereas this one is a good general overview.  Plus it should be viewable by anyone without an account at the Orbx forum (apologies if I'm wrong!).

 

http://www.orbxsystems.com/forum/topic/61929-ftx-global-what-is-it-all-about/

 

Ignoring all the talk about FTX Global on that page, that picture explains very well the different layers in FSX scenery, and how they fit together.

 

There isn't a 100% consensus as to who has the best products, and for most of those layers, you'll find that there's at least two or three competitors.

 

[edit: I see I got beat in posting that same link by a few seconds! :lol: ]

Jinx 1-2-3 haha we must have been writing at the same time. :drinks: