alpilotx HD Mesh v4 Announced

[scotchegg 4,161]

Yes, it's time for Andras to test our bandwidth, hard drive space, and the patience of our partners with a new version of his amazing meshes:

https://flightdeckx.com/alpilotx-hd-mesh-v4-announced/

[turnandbank 243]

Good News indeed!

[tonywob 4,768]

Fantastic news and looking forward to this. Thanks Andras for all the work you do on X-Plane

[Guest-475 81]

Definitely looking forward to the release!

I'm in the process of moving all my (some TB) Ortho4XP scenery to the backup NAS, because the initial enthusiasm is gone and I don't feel the need to fill up my drives with orthos anymore. I'll keep the files just in case I want to switch back to ortho scenery in the future, but for now I'm done.

[jcomm 5,890]

Great News!

 

[alpilotx 505]

Ah ... sorry for not posting here ... My time was a bit short yesterday and the screenshot attachment options (or better, lack of them) here didn't motivate me much to post here.

And you guys spread the words anyways !

 

One important information:

HD Mesh Scenery v4 will NOT BE COMPATIBLE WITH XP10!

Reason: it references quite a few new autogen stuff introduced with XP11, which is not in the library of XP10. Which leads to "Failed to find resource ..." in XP10 and not loading the DSFs.

[Colonel X 1,428]

Great news! Especially for the folks that did not jump on the ortho hype train...

[Pochi 68]

Really great! And it may also be usefull for orthophoto users if we can use HD Mesh V4 to build the overlay! It may give better results than with XP11 default overlay?

Pierre

[Susu986 76]

8 hours ago, Colonel X said:

Great news! Especially for the folks that did not jump on the ortho hype train...

It's not a hype train (at least for me). I've made a conscious choice of orhophotos over a mesh scenery because it's more suitable for my needs, and I rather spend my system resources and storage capacity for ortho coverage, instead of a higher density mesh, and nicely curving roads. I understand that many people find mesh sceneries more important, and I also hugely respect Andras for the amazing service he is doing for the community. But I don't want to be labelled as someone who is brainlessly following a trend, in fact I don't like to see the whole Ortho4Xp movement labelled as hype train, which I find disrespectful towards Oscar's work. Both approaches (HD mesh and Orthos) have their pros and cons. I've made an informed choice which I'm sticking by, and I'm sure that there are many ortho users out there have done the same (and undoubtedly there are some clueless trend followers too, but that is the same with HD Mesh as well, so shall I call that the 'HD-mesh hype train?'). Either way, Andras has done an amazing job.

[Anxu00 176]

Great news indeed.

[MikeMJD 2]

15 hours ago, Anxu00 said:

Great news indeed.

Yes it is very welcome.

Great work by Andras

 

[Jimmy RFR 406]

Wow... there's really some stunning images in that thread on the Aerosoft forum. Really nice stuff!

[N1125Y 22]

...so it's a replacement for the stock mesh and improvement for V3, and we should not expect any issues with Ortho right ? 

  any idea what has been improved ? 

 

Cheers 

[soaring_penguin 428]

What I expect to be improved upon:

• higher resolution base mesh, meaning slopes, mountains are more like their real world counterparts
• same for roads and rivers, they will have more natural curves, maybe even the roads will stick better to the landscape (= less bridges, I really hope so).

because of the higher resolution and latest OSM data:

• towns, farmlands, small woods will be better represented, with more variation in the farmlands. 
• better forest coverage
• sea shores, beaches represent better the real world
• more lakes 

This could make Ortho4xp obsolete for many users.

Edit: this and Ortho are exclusive, you can only use one or the other for one tile. 

[alpilotx 505]

Well, jh71 gave already a relatively good summary of what to expect. But let me sum it up once more from my side:

• The mesh resolution is a bit above the level of HD Mesh Scenery v3 (increased the triangle density a bit)
  • this give - obviously - better DEM representation (slopes, mountains etc.)
  • this also vastly(!) improves the landclass data representation (which in X-plane is very closely coupled with the triangle size in the mesh). See the comparison shots in the post (in the same x-plane.org thread): https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/forums/topic/132419-preview-hd-mesh-scenery-v4/&do=findComment&comment=1272951
• The vector data simplification is far less aggressive than in the default mesh (where Laminar needed to do that to limit the overall size of the global scenery). Thus road / railroad bendings are more accurate and the same is true for rivers, shorelines. But lot of the road "representation" also depends on how X-plane "interprets" the data on-the-fly .... thus I have no full control of where/how bridges appear (even though usually it respects the road layering in OSM (which defines bridges / overpasses)
• HD Mesh Scenery v4 will also have the new "high buildings" feature included, which I introduced with Laminar in XP11. This puts all (well, with some filtering of not reasonable stuff from OSM)  buildings > 20m "height" or > 5 "building:levels" as some "high building" object (with a more or less correct height - as defined i n OSM) in the scenery ("building:levels" are simply multiplied by 4m to get an approximate height). This usually gives most cities a much better look  (New York is a great example, where in OSM almost all buildings already have a height defined). This same approach also "imports" antennas / masts from OSM (as antenna obstacles)  ... This all was missing in HD Mesh Scenery v3 (or  ... rather it used ages old, very limited FAA obstacle data)
• Of course, OSM data is also updated (its "date stamp" will be 1st October 2017) . Which makes it newer then current XP11 default mesh data and of course much, much newer than the data in HD Mesh Scenery v3
• Most of the Landclass data has been updated (which already happened with my work for the XP11 default scenery ... but HD can represent the high res landclass data much better ... see point 1)

Very, very, very important: landclass data (and especially forests) ARE (mostly - only a few exceptions) NOT from OSM! To learn more about this (where forests come from), read this extensive post on X-Plane.org:

• https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/forums/topic/124771-know-how-where-forests-do-come-from-in-x-plane/