I don't recall hearing them say the resolution of the mesh, does anybody know?

In current flight sims such as Xplane the mesh does not have very high resolution so scenery can have unnatural straight lines and be angular and things like railway embankments that we have in the UK cannot be modelled.

It would make a huge difference the realism of the scenery if we had mesh of high enough resolution to be able to get things like railway embankments and high detailed mountains for example but I don't recall seeing railways on the footage I've seen and certainly not moving trains as we do in Xplane.

I know trains and ground traffic and other eye candy are fairly low priority but hopefully they will all be represented and implemented well but it would be nice to know if high detailed topography will be possible with a very high res mesh.

What are your thoughts on any of the above? Do you have more information?

3 hours ago, Mucker said:

I know trains and ground traffic and other eye candy are fairly low priority but hopefully they will all be represented and implemented well but it would be nice to know if high detailed topography will be possible with a very high res mesh.

It would really help make the FS2020 world feel alive if there were trains and ships running on real world schedules.

There is absolutely no information about this for as far as I know. I would suppose that they will have terrain data with at least 30 DEM for certain parts of the world, but probably not for every part of the world. Then again they have Bing as a datasource so they might have access to more data than we can imagine. 

But even if they have the whole world elevation available at 1 DEM (which they won't) it won't be possible to render the terrain at that resolution. They will probably have a terrain resolution slider which will affect those railway embankments. 

Then again, they can also use tessellation to artificially create those embankments even on a 90 DEM terrain. So it's not really only a matter of available terrain resolution, but also of being able to render that terrain on every PC. 

As far as I remember a 30 m point to point Digital Elevation Mesh has been available for some years now, for the whole world (Shuttle data) and one cannot expect less for FS20 

Knowing that 19m DEM are widely available now  in the US, Western Europe and some other places (included in some payware meshes like Pilot's, Toposim), I hope furthermore that a 19 m mesh will be the baseline where available .

The 10 m and even 2.3 min LIDAR meshes for some areas maybe more problematic outside of the US but highly desirable . 

A good site to see the mesh state of the art is Toposim from FS mesh veteran Justin Tymes.   Justin is the man who introduced the mesh (and the LC !) to our hobby long ago, in 2k2.

As a comparison FSX was 38 m in the US, 90 m or worse elsewhere.

Now about the embankments, I don't see them possible except for a handcrafted mesh. Maybe where a 1 m LIDAR mesh exists though.

Edited October 13, 20196 yr by domkle