Well, I don't spend my life at the FS Team blogs (just a small part of it) and RSS is the radically-superfluous skinny as far as I am concerned.But, Adrian Woods has given out some small bits of information that could make our scenery world much more satisfyingly complex in the next FS:http://blogs.technet.com/torgo3000/articles/418037.aspxWhat? Higher resolution seasons? Imagine micro-climates, different seasons and ground textures and autogen from valley to mountain-side.And selective land class lookup tables! This is getting really complex, just like the real world.As usual, Adrian, does not reveal much. But, this does open up a world of possibilities, that is the least that can be said.Best regards.Luis

Hi Luis.If the design team allows us to give some more priority to local folders, alternate autogen and landclass textures could more easily be done... as well as restoring mesh to an unflattened condition in a local folder. Please.Dick

Luis, all this probably means is that the seasons bgl will made to match the landclass bgl. Yes, it's a big improvement and we will be able to do better snow cover, but it won't be micro-climates :)I like the idea of being able to customise the lclookup table.Dick, couldn't more agree with your comments! An easy system to add custom terrain without the current limits (flat elevations, memory leak when empty texture folder is present), would be just great.Christian

I agree with the urgency of solving the mesh and water flatten issue for FSX.I have studied the current proposed methods to un-flatten FS default flattens, and in addition to putting the FS world at risk for chaos, they seem too complex to undertake. So I have been grudgingly putting up with the flat islands and land bridges where flattened by "water" in my own sceneries.Thankfully, UT USA has solved most of my concerns with the shape, size and positions of default water bodies. But due to the resolution of the source data (90 meter reportedly), and possibly the author's choice of target resolution (in data points) of the derivation software he used, I have still some land areas (and all islands) overlying water in FS scenery that have been clobbered with flattens.As much as I would like to see a FSX 30 meter derived USA with correctly positioned "water-only flattens", I am concerned that we could still have this problem for any land purposely declared in (or accidentally treated as) water if an easier solution for this isn't provided in the FSX SDK. I'd love to find a good solution to use for FS2004 in the mean time, short of custom building islands in GMAX and/or using color-derived DEM techniques.I'd just like to use G2k4 and/or SBuilder (when I can get the time to learn it!) to create / fix islands and land bridges over water, and then have the land dropoff to water at FS shorelines as in the real world. I've tried using the re-mesh function in G2k4 for raising my islands out of the water, but the water itself simply creeps up to meet the top of the island instead of an abrupt dropoff or cliff at the waters edge. I have seen Dick Ludowise's early tutorial showing the cutting off a hillside by positioning a water body nearby resulting in a cliff shoreline, but I'm just not able to achieve this thus far in G2k4; I get a shallow slope instead.So when I add a lake inland where there is no default FS water flatten, and I place an island in that lake, again my island comes out flat with the water rising up to meet the island's assigned elevation. I have the impression that is due to the way the present LWM technology works, but I still wonder how Dick achieved those cliffs using the FS2002/2004 SDK!Hey Dick (aka Rhumbaflappy) and anyone else: any suggestions on how to better solve "local" water flatten problems (without converting global water to mesh-clinging) while we await what FSX will bring us? Thanks!GaryGB

It seems like UT makes extensive use of mesh clinging water. That has the advantage of making islands simply land LWM masks. But inevitably there are hills in the water. These doesn't seem to be any easy way to create flattened water around an island, unless someone creates an algorithm to split a polygon with a "hole" in it into two polygons and puts it into a design or GIS tool.scott s..