Everytime i've tried mesh terrain i always seem to see random spikes at various locations or the airports are elevated above the ground as though they are on a flat hill. Which is the best mesh available for USA which does not elevate the airports. ThanksPaul.

Paul - Unfortunately, they are all going to have elevated airports. MSFS can't yet deal with sloping runways (here's hoping they fix that in FSX) so everything is set to the highest elevation point so as to keep it flat. (That may not be exactly technically correct but it's the general idea :-) )Doug

Yup, what Paul said.Tony=http://www.flightsim-bevs.com]

How widespread and sereious an issue is the mesh/airport problem? I was just getting ready to get FSGenisis meshes(if that's a word).?I've heard LAX is off, for example.. will most larger, regional, etc airports exhibit this problem?.. kind of a subjective question, I know... maybe I should just download a couple and check things out....Thanks,Bill

Most airports you will not see a problem with. It is a trade-off. If you want to see more detailed terrain, you will occasionally see an airport sitting on a plateau.There is some freeware FSGenenesis mesh right here on Avsim to try out. If you like them, you can always purchase the payware latter, which I do recommend.Tony

The biggest problem I had was in and around Chicago. Not only was MDW on a plateau, but not ord, there were smaller plateaus sprouting up all over the place. I looked like I was raising mushrooms. I removed that mesh only and that solved the problem. I hope FSX resolves all that once and for all.Bob

I don't recall seeing any problems like that in the Chicago area. What mesh were you using?Don't hold your breath on it being fixed in FSX. As some of the MSFS team member have written blogs on, it is not a simple issue to address. I'm not saying it won't be fixed, but I am trying to stay realistic.Tony

Hi Bob,sounds like the mesh you used was based on Shuttle Radar (SRTM) data. The problem with those data is that the radar beam tracked hard surfaces, including bigger buildings and other human-made structures. Thus, in larger cities terrain mesh compiled from SRTM data often looks much more "bumpy" than it should be.For many regions of the planet SRTM data are the best free sources we have but for the US and Canada much better source data exists (NED and CDED, respectively). The FSGenesis mesh files here in the library as well as the commercial versions are made from NED and CDED data.Having said that, this doesn't change the issue with the misplaced or non-sloped default airfields (as well as similar problems with the default lakes). That's why the suggestion to start with some of the high-quality freeware files is a good one.Cheers, Holger

Although not just USA, i have Justflight's 'FS Terrain' on a 4CD pack. Can't in all honesty say i'm impressed. Don't know what the relief is with it, doesn't seem to say in the booklet. Just states it's 'upto 16 times' greater than default. I guess the FSGenisis stuff is much better detail???

Thanks for the answers, guys. As I remember I was using FS Genesis freeware 38m. No problems any where else. In fact, it solved other minor problems, so I couldn't complain.But I remember shortly after installing FS9 I was making a flight to MDW and I was very puzzled when MDW was on a plateau. This was a right-off-the-CD install with NO add-ons at the time. I stopped flying to MDW, but much later and after many add-ons I went back and the plateau was gone. That was until I installed and then un-installed mesh.Sorry to hear about FSX not curing these problems.Bob

Thanks Tony,I'll give it a shot, thousands of people can't be wrong..

On the plateaus --some one mentioned KMRY as a problem area and I took a look -- that's correct, it isn't that good. Part of the problem is that the default airports all have a flatten under them. If you look at the flatten area for KMRY in FS9, and then look at it in Google Earth, you see that the flatten is much larger than the actual "flat area" of the real airport. This contributes to the plateau effect. (In the case of KMRY, with UT USA the Old Del Monte G/C was on the slope of the plateau -- not so good!) As a test I edited the default FL9 file, and added my own flatten that I designed using google earth screen shot as a guide. I think it was much improved, but still somewhat of a plateau (I also used the NED data from seamless to check).there is a similar problem with PHHI in Hawaii. On this one MS used an old airport diagram and built a flatten around it. What they didn't know is that one of the runways (now closed) was actually built in the bottom of a gulch as a "hidden" runway connected by a tunnel to an underground aircraft assembly facility built into the nearly mountains during WWII. So the flatten knocked out the gulch area (the gulch doesn't show up until you install better mesh).My hope for FSX is that it is possilble to exclude flattens so you don't have to edit the default files to get rid of them.scott s..