Hi friends,

I dont own MSFS yet and was curious about something. Terrain mesh like FSGlobal, FSGenesis, FreeMesh & HDMesh etc are very popular with FSX & X-Plane 11. 

Would MSFS benefit from such an addon or is the default global terrain mesh out of the box accurate enough to not require it? I ask because the meshes in those older sims made a difference in places like the Himalayas, Andes etc. It bumped things up to LOD12 in places like America. What is the LOD for MSFS terrain out of the box?

 

The mesh in some places is very good, in other places in need of improvement..

Why don't you just buy the Standard Edition and see for yourself?

If you are curious, install a copy, and join the club.. that is what we all did! 🙂

Edited September 23, 20205 yr by Bert Pieke

8 minutes ago, ThrottleUp said:

is the default global terrain mesh out of the box accurate enough to not require it?

Well now that's subjective. I'm sure that most are fine with it but it is not the best out there. At least I have seen better in P3D with FSGU NG.

For sure 😀I will buy the sim ( but only when I get my new rig, I wont waste time on this old one, it will be a slideshow and spoil my fun!)

Im just wondering aloud about what the terrain elevation resolution is like in MSFS - are the Himalayas, Andes, Rockies, Urals etc nice and jagged? One immersion killer in FSX was seeing some default mountains showing up like gentle rolling hills. 

Edited September 23, 20205 yr by ThrottleUp

I've seen several people comment that some of the more 'jagged' real life hills are, indeed, too "rolling" in the sim.  Likely due to terrain mesh resolution and a curve fit being applied to connect the points.

There are a lot of mesh errors in the nothern parts of north america (Alaska and Canada) and nothern Scandinavia (Norway, Sweden and Finland). If MS/Asobo doesn't fix these errors, I hope that 3:d party developers will do. I would sure purchase better mesh. 

I wonder if all the mesh is stored as local assets or is something streamed?

1 hour ago, ThrottleUp said:

is the default global terrain mesh out of the box accurate enough to not require it?

Most definately not. It absolutely holds no candle to FS Global. It is not much better than the default FSX mesh. The U.S. has good mesh (naturally since it is available for free) and that is pretty much it. 

The Alps for example are abysmally bad.

On average I'd say it is a LOD 10 or 11 mesh, globally. Nice from a distance, a joke close up.

 

 

Edited September 23, 20205 yr by Farlis

Read this:

https://orbxsystems.com/forum/topic/199673-lowi-mountains/?tab=comments#comment-1708090

The terrain mesh being too low, or rather lower than add-on meshes for other sims, was mentioned frequently in the Alpha test.

I suspect it's a question of user RAM minimal requirement to run the sim. The free 3rd party HD and UHD mesh for X-Plane requires more than the default sim's RAM requirement, especially the higher-res UHD mesh where you really want at least 32 GB RAM. 

There are many areas in MSFS where sharp jagged mountain ridge lines are shown as soft curves and could be improved. If Asobo needs to limit the default mesh based on RAM requirements (as X-Plane does), then I think there's a market for a 3rd party add-on, if you have the RAM overhead or whatever else is needed to support it.

 

Edited September 24, 20205 yr by Paraffin

With the "streaming from the cloud" nature of MSFS, I'd expect Microsoft to provide the more detailed terrain mesh "in the cloud" and let the clients choose dynamically what LOD to download based on system RAM requirements.

Shouldn't have to pay for 3rd party content to do this, it should be wrapped up with their next-gen "world".

I guess we'll see if the first World Update improves the mesh for whatever part of the World it applies to.