Hello,I have purchased some mesh from FSGen and am very happy with it. I have seen the add's for ?photo real? and "mega scenery" as well as packages "misty fjords".Of these and others like it I am having a hard time telling if the specific add on is add on scenery, mesh, or what have tou. I was wondering if there was a good rule of thumb or some type of guidelines to help somone make a wise purchase. For examble I do not know what is compatable and if I can have one geografic area covered by 2 add on's? The best area I can think of at this time is Alaska. There are a bunch of add on's to choose from. I am sure all ofer nice benifits. For whatever reason I yend to think of buildings, people, other planes, airfield equipment as add on scenery and terrian enhancements as mesh. But then I start looking at landclass, mega and the others and get really lost.Any ideas are really appreciated.Thanks.P.S. I hope the question is not to basic. Thanks agian.

I am in the same boat. I will be looking somthing over and get reasy to buy it, then I stop becuase I have no clue if it will work with whats installed already. We need garanimals (or what ever the line of cloths for kids that had tags that allowed you to match articles), LOL.I have purchased the rlite membership from FSGen and also very happy with all the mesh. I am unsure of the photo real line of products but have noticed that some of the add on's now have a statment or two that they are compatible with a particular mesh. The one I see most is FSGen.Good luck.Mark.

FSG mesh works with Megascenery just fine so no worries there.However, if you have US Roads by Flight1 the Megascenery will cover up the roads in those areas where the Megascenery is visible. I'm not sure how add-ons like US Roads will function with other photo terrain sceneries but the same thing should occur. I think this is caused because photo based sceneries essentially lay a photo over your terrain so all textures underneath are covered.Hope this helps a little and adds a little more info for you to remember when checking out some scenery packages. :)"Garanimals" LMAO!

what happens if you put US Roads on a higher priority in the scenery library over megascenery? I've never purchased it but that seems to be a slight drawback if the roads and covered IMOAnything by FSGenesis is fantastic, mesh, landclass. Anything else like photoreal scenery to me is out of place considering its just small areas of land in certain cities, if you fly long distances it makes the default terrain look completely out of place.

>what happens if you put US Roads on a higher priority in the>scenery library over megascenery? I've never purchased it but>that seems to be a slight drawback if the roads and covered>IMO>>Anything by FSGenesis is fantastic, mesh, landclass. Anything>else like photoreal scenery to me is out of place considering>its just small areas of land in certain cities, if you fly>long distances it makes the default terrain look completely>out of place.Moving it up on the priority list doesn't change anything, IIRC. That was the one major drawback that caused me to remove my MegaScenery and not purchase any more of the series. Megascenery no doubt looks fantastic but I really enjoy US Roads, especially at night. Also, I tend to fly a little bit lower at times and MegaScenery doesn't look too hot at some of the lower altitudes.

Hi.As far as i know one basic rule of thumb i read was thisMesh = basic earth surface elevation data such as flatlands, valleys, hills, slopes, mountains and surface water level data etcTextures = everything that is placed on the mesh such as trees, vegetation, water, farmland, streams etc Landclass = file data (usually man-made) that is also placed on mesh, such as roads, houses, buildings etcthis might help simplify things a littlecheersDan

Thanks Dan.For this example I will use the add on for the Vail airport, the add on placed the missing buildings along with some airfield equipment along with gates for AA, Delta and the like. So any add on scenery that puts a building in place is Landclass? I am wandering if any add on's that call them selfs landclass do not include buildings. I am not trying to split hairs, I just feel that with an evolving computer product like this the more it is discussed the better chance we all have of understanding.Thanks for your imput and I welcome any other imput.Thank you.

"Photo terrain" consists of square tiles, each covering an area of LOD13 (1.2 km on a side). "Photo terrain" can have autogen objects assigned to specific places on the tile. "Photo terrain" also has a so-called alpha channel (1 bit) which can make the area of the tile trasnparent, so that the assigned landclass and VTP terrain will show. In the default photo scenery (scenerycitiesvarious), the alpha is used to allow water to show through. But, there is nothing preventing using it to allow VTP terrain, such as USARoads, to show through (though building the mask for a road network seems like a lot of work to me).Landclass is also a set of LOD13 tiles that can have autogen assigned. But in the case of landclass, the neighboring tiles are gradually blended together, so the edge is not obvious.VTP terrain is displayed "over" the landclass tiles. There are two main types: LWM defines areas where landclass or waterclass should be shown within a LOD13 area. VTP polys (which include lines) have textures assigned to them, which are drawn (or draped if you will) over the landclass/waterclass. In FS9, it is possible to assign autogen to the line polys (this is how the roads are done in the default). The behaviour is controlled by the config file, terrain.cfg. VTP polys can cover a larger area -- up to LOD8 (32x32 LOD 13 areas).3D objects are drawn after the terrain. It is possible to create flat "3D" polys (such as runways) that lie on the ground. One advantage of using the 3D object approach, is that the possible resolution is higher (terrain has a best resolution of 4.75m/pixel).Addons should make clear what type of scenery they provide. In most cases, they can be installed into their own scenery areas (via scenery.cfg) so they won't interfere (but you will have to test to see if the addon excludes or otherwise "covers up" other scenery that you wish to retain). Unfotunately, some of the "replace or cover up" effects are kind of subtle, so it is hard to give absolute rules on what will replace what.scott s..

Hello,I think any scenery that calls itself 'landclass' will include buildings.Scott's post provides a more detailed insight than i can, but i would add that i think that you can superimpose all or any combinations together. So you could add autogen or landclass scenery on top of photoreal scenery. Then you could add textures on top of these as well (e.g fsscene). I suppose it comes down to what your goal is i.e do you want great mesh, or landclass, or perhaps photoreal scenery (which is usually best viewed from a greater height and often has no night textures or seasonal effects)CheersDan