I have all the gateway airports as far as I can tell, despite having uninstalled the base scenery.

For example, I'm using only custom scenery for southern California, but I have 3D gateway airports like John Wayne, Oceano or Santa Barbara in place without needing to download them seperately.

Yes, thats my understanding too. Like all the apt.dat (for airports) the 3D Global Airports (all of them) are part of the basic XP11 installation (even if there is no mesh under them ... and they end up in the middle of the big ocean).

So, let me get this straight, I can install X-Plane (10/11) without any default scenery and then add 3rd party? And what would be your recommendations for a good 3rd party (world) scenery? And thank you for the article, very helpful.

Yes, you can do that, but there is no 100% golbal scenery at the moment. But Alpilotx's HD/UHD scenery covers North and South America, Europe, Australia and some other areas of general interest:

 

http://www.alpilotx.net

 

Highly recommended!

 

 

Highly recommended!

 

Though you should take note of this: http://www.avsim.com/topic/498742-differences-between-xp11-default-global-scenery-and-hd-mesh-scenery-v3/ I myself decided to stick with XP11 default for various reasons (like the roads looking better in Europe). I will look again at Mesh HD when a new version has been released. BTW I also noticed once that at a specific spot default scenery had a few little lakes in Norway where Mesh HD had none so it seems the newer newer OSM data sometimes also gives better results...? In other places (like the airport near my hometown) things looked less real. It's a bit subjective and you have to make choices here.  :wink: Anyway, default is fine with me. May perform better in places too.

Though you should take note of this: http://www.avsim.com/topic/498742-differences-between-xp11-default-global-scenery-and-hd-mesh-scenery-v3/ I myself decided to stick with XP11 default for various reasons (like the roads looking better in Europe). I will look again at Mesh HD when a new version has been released. BTW I also noticed once that at a specific spot default scenery had a few little lakes in Norway where Mesh HD had none so it seems the newer newer OSM data sometimes also gives better results...? In other places (like the airport near my hometown) things looked less real. It's a bit subjective and you have to make choices here.  :wink: Anyway, default is fine with me. May perform better in places too.

Thats absolutely normal about OSM ... different scenery is cut with a different "snapshot" of the gigantic - very quickly evolving / changing / updating - OSM dataset.

 

HD Mesh Scenery v3 is based on (I cite my own website ... this is no secret): (OSM) data from: approximately 10th of October 2014 / for Himalaya end of April 2015 / South America 25th of October 2015

 

Whereas the current default Global Scenery for XP11 is based on data from August 2016. This - of course!! - leads to differences it water to (because all water features are derived from OSM - with one exception being Canadian lakes :wink: )

 

On the other hand the current default Global Scenery for XP11 is using a stronger vector simplification to reduce size of the resulting scenery DSFs. Its complex to explain ... but water is part of the base mesh, and thus a more detailed vector coastline also induces much more triangles (thus, reducing the vector detail at coastlines reduces mesh size too ... in a way).