Looking for Canada and USA Mesh for FS9

[Guest VCSIGDA]

Hi all, I am new to all of this mesh stuff, but I am looking to download mesh for all of Canada and the USA. I was thinking of downloading all of Rob Gainer's 76m for the USA, mixed with Holgers BC Mesh. I do not no if this is the way to go. Any other suggestions? I think I understand that I can use FS2000 and FS2002 mesh as well. There was one site suggested by Holger that had all of the USA in FS2002 format.http://www.simviation.com/fsdterrainusa.htm Do I go this route for FS2204? Then What would I use for Canada and will they blend together.As not to confuse this whole post, I am just asking what you would suggest I do, If you were looking to mesh these complete areas. Sorry if this has been asked before and I have not done my homework yet, but a step in the right direction is a good start.Thanks for your time and happy flying,-Vincent

[Holger 0]

Hi Vincent:In general, I don't think it's really necessary to limit yourself to the add-on mesh of just a few authors. FS does a pretty good job of picking the best mesh for areas of overlapping add-ons: http://www.fs-traveler.com/tips-g.shtmlThere's lots of add-on mesh to choose from and the payware mesh providers have a good selection of freebies too.Having said that, for the US, the Rothlisberger (simviation) mesh and Rob Gainer's recent files are your only freeware choice with more or less full coverage. You've read our comments about the simviation mesh and Rob doesn't like critical evaluation of his work so there's not much more to say. Perhaps do a search for "Rothlisberger" and "Gainer" to find previous posts with user discussions?For Canada, there's Gilles Gauthier's excellent mesh series of the Maritimes, Quebec, and Nunavut. He's done a ton of work to make the lake levels and default coastline match with the LOD9 add-on mesh and, in fact, pioneered a method for lake elevation patches that I then used for my B.C. and Alberta mesh files. Parts of Ontario are covered by SRTM LOD9 meshes made by David Voogd and Paul Morrison but I haven't personally tried them.There's a neat free Vancouver Island LOD10 mesh by Justin of FS Genesis, available on his website, which starts about where my BC mesh file ends.That's about all I know. Again, I encourage you to look for smaller high-res meshes of US areas, such as the National Parks etc. Look at the payware sites in the download sections or search here for "Steve Greenwood" and "Justin Tyme". Or do a search by state or place to find other authors. In general, mesh made from NED data is less prone to display problems than SRTM data but that doesn't mean that SRTM-based meshes are all bad; for most places outside the US they are all we have and careful (pre-)processing can take care of a lot of the issues inherent to SRTM data. Hope that helps.Cheers, Holger

[Guest VCSIGDA]

Thanks Holger,Looks like I have to do some more studing and searching before I jump into a situation of what mesh to choose. You gave me excellent advice to get me started, I am sure I will have more questions, but for now I will search the forums and sites.Thanks again for taking the time to post to me, greatly appreciated.Vincent

[Holger 0]

Hi Vincent:you're very welcome!Once you've found your "dream team" of add-on mesh files it would be great to post the list in one of the forums because I'm sure the same question will be asked again. Cheers, HolgerP.S.: I just remembered that Dwayne Matheson uploaded SRTM-based add-on LOD8 and LOD9 mesh files of Alberta and Saskatchewan, so that (almost) fills the gap between the Ontario mesh and my Rockies' files

[Bluescaster 21]

Hi again All, I'm still trying to figure out all the inner workings of Flight Sims, having been years flying the defaults and just now starting to realise there's lots more to be had with the add - ons. Following this thread regarding, "Lots of smaller mesh...." can I take it that one can load up a variety and they will join together; or is that an over simplification of the advice you are giving Holger?Regards Blue

[madmat 0]

>For Canada, there's Gilles Gauthier's excellent mesh series of the Maritimes, Quebec, and Nunavut. He's done a ton of work to make the lake >levels and default coastline match with the LOD9 add-on mesh >and, in fact, pioneered a method for lake elevation patches that I then used for my B.C. and Alberta mesh files. Hi Holger,What was the method used to do the elevation patches? I have tried TMFFlatten but it is a bit tedious. It does work though. I have a decent Mesh of Manitoba now, and I redid my Saskatchewan using the SRTM Fill program and I am fairly pleased with the final output except the lakes.Any help would be niceDwayne

[Holger 0]

Hi Dwayne,Well, the idea is quite simple: instead of creating external patches for each lake one manipulates the default LWM files directly.So much for the simple part...In practice, this means you have to decompile the HP file with LWMViewer (easy), be able to understand and navigate through the .bgs file (learning curve!), and find an efficient way to determine the correct elevations (tricky for now).The problematic issue with the LWM files is that they cover huge areas (8x8 LOD8 Cells with 32x32 LOD13 Areas each), that all data are broken into LOD13 Areas (i.e., most lakes consist of many separate polygons) and that the order of the LOD13 Areas is not top-left to bottom-right but rather according to the FS-native quadtree format.In other words, one has to be quite confident with navigating and editing LWM files to make this an efficient alternative. Once you understand the format it's possible to fix many and/or large lakes quite fast though the process remains tedious. For example, for my bcmesh9d and bcmesh9e, I adjusted all lakes in four LOD5 areas, which took about 5 to 8 hours per LOD5.In general, I'd say that this method is more suited for areas where the lakes aren't too dense and not at similar elevations. I know that Gilles had a much harder time fixing the lake elevations in Quebec and I suppose the problem might be similar in other places of the Canadian Shield. Both Gilles and I worked on our patches before LWMViewer was available. Therefore, we had to use the corresponding FS2002 files. It was more tedious (e.g., with LWMViewer you can now easily determine a lake's LOD13 Area coordinates on-screen) but it had one advantage: using TMFViewer, we could display the LWM files on top of the add-on mesh and thus easily determine the correct lake elevation. Unfortunately, LWMViewer doesn't (yet) allow to read the mesh elevation and you have to find a different method to determine the correct altitude.Hope I didn't discourage you ;-) Since I've figured out how to use the LWM and VTP source files, I've done all my elevation fixes and other edits this way - it is much more efficient and looks better too, IMHO.Cheers, Holger

[madmat 0]

Wow, nice answer! I'll get the LWMViewer and have a look through some of the documents I can find to see if I can do this. Sounds daunting, but may be easier than I think... and then again, maybe not! I have noticed that many lakes are not at the elevation that the Natural Resources says they are.Thanks for the answer, I'll give it a try.Dwayne

[Holger 0]

Hi Dwayne:you're welcome. Forgot to mention this post by Rhumba that explains the new LWM3 code: http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...ing_type=searchTo understand all of it you probably need to read through the FS2002 SDKs and Rhumba's LWM tutorial.Cheers, Holger

[rhumbaflappy 113]

Hi Dwayne.To complicate matters further, MS has used some poor data to shape and place the water and their shorelines ( giving us all something to do in our spare time ).When the mesh and the water don't match, it's usually the water that is at fault. We can remask the water polys, but the flattening of that original water will remain, even after the water is remasked by a new BGL. This requires us to consider replacing entire default HP BGLs.Holger has been busy making images for Ground2K4 from LandSAT images. Perhaps such an image could be made for the area you want to rework.Or LWMviewer can export an image of the BGLs of such an area, or it's source code, and you could work on that ( as Holger suggested ). Or once the AVSIM Library is up and running, you could use Edgar Knobloch's LWM Converter utility to recompile the default water involved to mesh-clinging CFS2 water ( which works in FS9 ). Then replace the offending default BGLs. By converting & replacing the default HP bgls, you can now work on much smaller areas of interest, while the rest of the area is simply mesh-clinging water ( a solution I prefer ).If you want to keep the default water, then you could make flattens to raise or lower the default water to a better elevation. Steve Greenwood has made a utility to do just this:http://www.fs-traveler.com/resources-g.shtml--- Utility to flatten terrain (see Tips for more info) ----Or, like most simmers, you could just forget the whole water problem, and enjoy the mesh as it is. ;)Dick

[Holger 0]

Hi Rhumba:sorry, I meant to include your preferred procedure as an option but then I started looking for the link to Edgar's LWM converter and got sidetracked...... about a really annoying thing with my IE (6.08.2800). This is off-topic but maybe someone knows an answer: I recently switched to IE after Netscape developed a strange memory leak. Everything works fine in IE except that, only in the avsim forums, whenever I open a second window (e.g., search for a specific thread), I get kicked out. Half of the time I can just log in again and the post I'm writing is still there but for the other 50% what I've typed so far is gone (now I copy my text into Wordpad to be sure). Any idea how I can get IE to let me stay logged in at AVSIM?Cheers, Holger

[madmat 0]

Hello Dick, Thanks for the ideas, perhaps the mesh clinging water will work, and be a little easier than the "hunt through the exported data" method :) I like the mesh I made, I think it looks pretty good, but I dislike craters filled with water and lake plateaus, and so a way to fix them would be nice. I'll watch for the library to come back online and then search for the LWM converter and have a hack at that.ThanksDwayne