Terrain Mesh Question

[Guest Elthium]

Just bought FSX and am new to flight sims.Over at FSProject I saw a free 10M Hawaii scenery add-on. In my scenery section I can adjust the slider to 10M. Is there then any advantage in installing the above software seeing as how I can already set the game display to 10M? Would it improve my frame rate?Thanks.

[Ramasurinen 0]

Hey there. To answer your questions. Yes FSX can display 10m scenery, if it is present. The basic mesh for the world that comes with FSX varies in its complexity greatly, depending on location. Some areas are 38m, a lot is 76m or 150m, some is 1000m for remote areas, and only a few places, grand canyon etc, may have 10m scenery by default.If the whole world was 10m mesh, it would take about 100 dvds to cover it. ;)If you set your slider to 38m, that means that even if you are flying over 10m scenery, it will dumb it down to 38m. However it will not "rez up" a 76 or 150m area. It may try to interpolate it a bit to 38m, but that can lead to some visual oddities. Generally speaking terrain density has little effect on overall performance as it is easily the most efficient part of the rendering engine. Actually it might be the only efficient part. :) If you get that hawaii addon 10m mesh, you will need to set your slider to 10m to see it properly, at least when you're flying over hawaii. 10m may be a bit overkill anywhere else though.Hope that helps!

[scott967 62]

You can set the slider to anything you like, but you aren't going to change the maximum resolution of the source data. According to the SDK tool tmfviewer, the max resolution of the data in default file dem0003.bgl is LOD10 = 38m for most of Hawaii. But it looks like Ka'ula Island is only LOD8 = 152m and what I think is Necker or maybe Nihoa Island is only LOD4 = 2446m. I couldn't see any data at all for any of the other NW islands, nor Midway / Kure.Can't speak for his mesh, but in addition to the 10m (1/3 sec) stuff, you might want to look for some 76m (3 sec) data to supplement it.scott s..

[Guest Elthium]

Thx for the info guys, it helps a lot. Just trying to wrap my head around all these new concepts while trying to find the best eye candy without turning FSX into a slide show:-) BTW, I tried the Snowdonia VFR demo from the Horizon folks, was absolutely blown away with it. Plus I could use it whilst disabling all the autogen stuff which meant 20fps! I can just see what my present from me to me is gonna be for X-mas...Cheers.