=Hollywood=

Hi Safaba,I can do up an elevation mesh for you pretty quickly, I just moved my business operations to Guam and live near the end of the runway here. Anyway I'll call some government agencies and see if I can find some aerial imagery (unfortunately the best imagery is old and the airport has changed a lot), in the meantime I'll look into seeing if I can get permission to photograph the airport and see if I can get a 3D modeller interested...Cheers,Dean.

Hi guys,Thanks for the comments, we're working on airport plateau fixes for all airports and not just punching holes in the mesh like MSFT did and others... Realize though that for Europe and the USA that there are thousands of airports that all need to be hand traced around the perimeter of the airport and that takes time. I'm outsourcing a team in another country to do the traces but there's literally tens of thousands of airports in FSX and most are in the USA and Europe...The problem with the plateaus are not with the mesh, they're a problem with FSX only being able to render airports on a flat piece of ground. There are fixes that can be done using ADE from ScruffyDuck to blend your favorite airport into the terrain... We were expecting FS11 to come out that we hoped would allow for sloped runways but since Microsoft canned the product we're now in the process of developing version 3.0 of the meshes (which will be a free upgrade to all customers) and we'll continue to improve the quality of the product over time as technology allows.Think about it this way, the airport plateaus are a limitation of FSX, and have been a limitation of FS since version 1.0... Justin has only recently started to punch holes around the airport to allow the default mesh underneath to show through. Being that many airports are off from their real world locations we have chosen to fix airport plateaus and move all airports to their real location once we develop the photoscenery for the areas. The point is we shouldn't go punching holes in the data when the default airport is not in the correct location... We're providing the canvas for other developers to build upon and have things geospatially correct...Also for the rest of the world, the FS Genesis mesh is great with the SRTM and deFerranti data. Justin is a friend of ours and we highly recommend his SRTM data for areas not covered by the NEXTMap ProMesh data. The difference with the USA though is that the 10m data Justin has is very very old data, sometimes up to 60 years old and some is from 16bit source which leads to stair stepping and tiger striping on the mesh. Also you lose details such as new interstate freeways cut through mountains etc etc etc... The Intermap data is significantly improved at 5m resolution...For Europe there's no comparison between 90m post space srtm data which has a lot of holes and voids and errors +/- 20m (RMSE) vertically compared to 5m post space data with RMSE in the range of +/-1m vertically...As for Utah, it's currently pre-order and the beta version is currently available now as a preliminary download while we await the master water data set to be generated professionally which is not far away. We're about to launch California fully complete with water mapping soon.Cheers,Dean.

Pat just confirming you have your mesh set to 5m in your settings menu?Also it appears that you may have the freeware mesh at a higher priority in your scenery library which means that it is overriding the NEXTMap® ProMesh data...If there's areas that are as not accurate as they could be we do ask for you to let us know so that the area can be re-worked to be the best quality possible...What the 19m data won't give you though is the narrow canyons or high resolution ground data with quarries and mines and road cuts etc etc etc...We can fix this for you and appreciate you bringing it to our attention, that's what we need from customers so we can improve the product... I however don't think the whole product is flawed because of one tiny area that we can easily have reworked and the 5m data is definitely more accurate than the 19m data as a whole... Also Pat, your post is a little fallacious in it's claims...If an area of ground is a certain shape and doesn't have much detail of course it will look similar as it is not an area of high detail regardless of whether it's SRTM 90m data, 19m data or 5m data...If I were to turn on the wireframe rendering of that same area you'd see how much extra detail is in the 5m elevation data compared to the 19m data...You simply cannot take one tiny peak in France and make claims that the whole product is flawed, that is wrong...I repeat we are committed to quality and with over 213,010 sq mi of coverage for France we rely on our customers to notify us if any areas that might have inaccuracies so they can be fixed...Further to that, the area you mention is a tiny area based upon de Ferranti data and does not cover the entire coverage of France... If you want we can incorporate some of the de Ferranti data as well...

I know of several, but think about it this way... 24,000+ airports would take how many years? Maybe 5 years to do completely and properly... In that time there would definitely be a new sim...I do give kudos to Justin though for his hard work and dedication for the stuff he's doing as it's really hard work...

Thanks for that post David, really nice to see some encouragement... Well said...

To be honest by the time it would take to fix all 24,000+ airports in FSX to remove the plateaus the next new flight simulator will likely be already here and supporting sloping runways...So the question is why waste all that time and energy?

Oh gosh it's been so many years since I've used FS2004 and Ultimate Terrain... Likely your best bet is to reach out to the flight1 ultimate terrain forums and Allen would probably be able to give you a more direct answer...http://www.simforums.com/forums/forum_topics.asp?FID=19Cheers,Dean.

Ah the lakes issue is another matter, there's a couple of approaches that will help with that depending on how you're running your scenery...a) is to use Ultimate Terrain X and either that will resolve most issues or you can use it to quickly turn off all the water flatten featuresB) is to go into your terrain.cfg file and for all water bodies ensure "waterflatten=0"c) if you're using photoscenery and per chance data from Intermap's NEXTMap ProMesh, the water flattens are burned in to the mesh, so the default FSX water flattens can be turned off...The easiest method to deal with water flatten issues though is using Ultimate Terrain X regardless of which high res mesh you have installed as the water bodies are way more accurate.Cheers,Dean.

Hmmm http://sirx.flightsimulatorcenter.com/ seems to be having server issues...

A lot of those issues can be solved by using ADE from ScruffyDuck and creating blend polygons, but that is really a community based type of process...The other issues with either cutting holes in mesh as is the case with any 'plateau fixes' is that many FSX airports are off from their real world location, the question then becomes one of 'what happens when i add photoscenery to it', the flattens will flatten out terrain that shouldn't be flattened...It was expected that a future version of FS would resolve the issue of having to have completely flat runways but with the demise of ACES who knows what the future really holds...I would venture to say though that it's not worth spending years of man hours manually providing custom hand made flatten fixes for the over 24,000+ airports in the FSX world... By the time it would be complete, we'd probably be at FSnext x 2...There are limits to today's technology, unfortunately completely flat airports in MSFS is one of them...

Interesting thread...There's a whole gamut of different scenarios we can all talk about...Some dev's are releasing stuff as sub standard, while at other times user expectations can be totally unrealistic... I loved the post about being nerd-bullied first thing in the morning...There's been times where the 'few' have made me question if it's worth continuing development for the masses...There's the occasional one customer who incessantly emails every couple of days, when is this going to be released, what's happening now, over and over again, no matter that we blog every detail we're able to discuss publicly... One guy was so demanding about the beta process happening that very minute and was very rude in his emails as if it was all about him, that I ended up refunding all his purchases and said thanks but no thanks...Over the last 20 years I've seen many developers come and go, a lot of the good developers leave because they do have a life to lead and don't need the drama of insatiable demands of some users who have unrealistic expectations...The one thing in photoscenery I see a lot (regardless of which developer it is) is...a) I want my neighborhood completely covered in photosceneryB) I want every airport lined up correctly to match the photosceneryc) I want the download to be less than 1GB for the entire productd) I want to have completely evenly colored photoscenerye) I want no building lean on all imageryf) I want no terrain shadowsthe answer to those is...a) That is in process but will take time due to the sheer volume of data, we're talking hundreds of TB of source data, let alone render dataB) With over 24,000+ airports in FSX and the majority being in the USA and Europe that is a task that is next to impossible to do without the contributions of freeware fixes by the communityc) There's only so much you can compress the data until it becomes a blended mess of color blotchesd) Not even the U.S. Military or other Top Military in the world have that type of data, the data simply is not available at this point in historye) See d)f) See d)I remember something one major global software developer once said..."We can't spend 90% of our energy on 5% of a product that will make little difference to the end sales figures."If every single bug or issue were to be fixed, products would never ever ship, and we simply don't live in a perfect world.Should we try and give 100-150%, of course, but at the end of the day nothing is ever perfect...As for the devs who release commercial products but are really just 'hacks' the market does dictate whether they fail or fly in their ventures...Just my 2 cents...

Christian, I had to head out of the office on an emergency and wasn't able to pay the bill before I traveled, I also didn't have internet access while away so I couldn't log into the office to pay the bill, we got hit by a typhoon on the way back, had no internet access in the province, I was in a place where water was pumped by hand and many houses had no electricty. On the way back the typhoon led to two landslides which had us trapped in the middle of nowhere with very little food or water to survive and our lives were at risk...I don't have the ability to buy an iPhone in this country because you need an ACR # in order to buy service, which costs nearly $1000, on top of the cost of the iPhone itself... There are other factors as well that are contributing factors which will come to light soon...As soon as I got home to civilization, even in the midst of losing electricity, I got the website back up within 5 mins of being home. Did you not notice the massive typhoon in the news that hit the region? Even with the best backup plans in the world you cannot avoid or plan for every single contingency, sheesh, while we were away Twitter was down for 2 days <G>...There have been changes in our operation since coming back that have been implemented to make sure we don't have the site offline like that again, but we're also not going to go wasting money needlessly on long term contracts when we have more immediate short term plans...As Geofa stated in another thread, its these type of unrealistic 'i'm never satisfied, pontificating statements' from people that are driving MSFS 3rd party developers to abandon MSFS users in favor of much more profitable and lucrative contracts... I know for me, I'm close to saying we're just going to finish up our current commitments and focus on projects that are less hassle and are much more lucrative...Most users in the FS community understand that these add-ons are a privilege and not a right, and also understand how much is involved in getting these type of datasets into users hands... Ultimately it's up to the FS community to show a level of maturity and understanding of what's involved, have realistic expectations (rather than ones that go far beyond even what the military industrial complex has), and realize that even what they have could be taken away from them... It already has been with the axing of ACES... Has the FS community not learned yet from that lesson???

As we've mentioned before we recommend all users of ProMesh for Europe use it in conjunction with Ultimate Terrain which provides accurate water bodies and solves a lot of the problems...We have also posted on our forums about how to fix the water flatten issues if users want the most accurate representation of the terrain...The water flattens in the ProMesh are already burned into the mesh data and aren't a problem with our data and are a problem with the inaccurate water that MSFT used for Europe and there is a fix for that, but why would we spend $$$$$$$$ licensing data from Teleatlas/NavTeq when it's already been licensed by Allen/Scenery Solutions??? That is both a waste of time and money...Also with the airport plateaus, we have made clear right from the start that there are thousands of airports and most airports do not have unusable plateaus and can be fixed by the community, which we are supporting, through the use of polygon blends done in ADE... We are providing a framework for others to build upon... The other factor is that to properly fix airport plateaus means having high resolution aerial imagery of each airport so we can correctly position each and every airport, runway and taxiway to their real world location. In Europe at this point in history it's just not feasible... In future we may offer a 'mesh for dummies' version with holes punched in the data and allow users to choose which version they prefer 100% accurate or hacked for FSX...With over 20,000+ airports in Europe and the USA it is impossible to start punching holes in data that is extremely accurate and is unwise to do when many airports in FSX are off from their real world location. That's just crazy to do, to properly fix those issues will involve thousands upon thousands of man hours and tens of thousands of dollars in contracting labor in countries like India and other 3rd world nations to provide fixes for something that will be superceded by a better sim that can render sloping runways etc way before we'd ever finish providing solutions to something that has nothing to do with the ProMesh data, but is a limitation of FSX...In short, they are problems with FSX limitations, our datasets are correct, FSX datasets are not... UTX fixes over 90% of river flatten issues, all else can be fixed with turning off water flattens in the terrain.cfg file as we have outlined many times before...The problem with water flattens is that they are tied in to water poplygons and the two *cannot* be separated, you can't exclude the water flatten without excluding the water body... We have given the solutions through our forums and email support and users wouldn't have those issues if they followed our advice...To solve the water flattens completely requires access to source imagery data for all of europe to generate photoscenery, which is not free or public domain... Try millions of dollars in cost to purchase/license that data... Next the airport plateaus are pointless to punch holes in correct datasets when the airports in FSX are often times off by several miles due to bad airport data provided by usa/european airport data providers who rely on their own data providers to provide them correct information. We also don't have millions of dollars available to contract scores of workers in 3rd world countries to trace our every boundary for every airport in the entire world...Justin's solution is the same one MSFS did, and that is to punch big round holes in the data around airports to make the problems disappear, but that does not lead to accurate simming... We have chosen the same path as Horizon when it comes to the high resolution elevation data and that is to provide accurate mesh and work with other devs with complementary products to ensure compatibility... Also when it comes to Europe, even with the default terrain mesh there are still many many many river plateaus and some are visible even within the FSX missions...As for the USA we are working on fixing every airport in the photoscenery/mesh products and we have plans we haven't publicly announced for our future development, but airport plateaus for the USA will cease to be an issue as development continues in the future...We're still porting our code to VB.net for the photoscenery and that takes 100 times more coding and processing than elevation data, the mesh products require all of one step to produce, and we have a contract to honor in producing those datasets, while we are continuing to build the software to complete the photoscenery (which is well over a 100 step process), we are using free compute cycles to develop these other products, which we have stated before, that in turn help FUND the development of the tools to generate the photoscenery...In terms of Oahu we have been working behind the scenes and we are finishing up those products, they're just not publicly visible yet *sheesh*, that's why we have our blog, our live video feed, status updates et al to keep everyone in the loop... If anyone thinks it's easy to develop this stuff I can tell you it's not. It requires huge amounts of data processing, a lot of programming and our programmer still has a full time job and has a life to lead as well... He is close to finishing the code for us but with having to port to .net it is a process to streamline the code so the computers can render as fast as possible... The problem with the FS community is that there can be highly unrealistic expectations... It's like the next version of FS, everyone wants it now, but if MSFT gives it now then everyone complains of bugs and complains no end about the bugs... There's an old saying that goes "you can't have your cake and eat it too"...Hope this clarifies the situation yet again...

firstly an extra 1-2GB RAM will help... What is your core speed? Also a DX10 card such as a 9800GT should suffice...If you have a slideshow usually it's because you're asking your system to do too much and trying to put through too much data on your CPU and GPU...Turn all the sliders down to minimum, then turn up your mesh and texture settings, then see what your frame rate is, then slowly turn on other features you want balancing what you feel is important to you...

Interesting datasets, not so good for Europe or the USA/Canada but for some locations in Australia, SE Asia, Africa and South America it looks very good for some local area features that SRTM doesn't tend to cover...I like the sound of Dick's idea for doing analysis and comparisons, but wouldn't there tend to be a 'stair step' effect in between the two datasets, i.e. say one dataset is RMSE +20 while the other is RMSE -20, that would end up with a 40m 'step' between the datasets... Unless the software can blend the datasets together to remove any such seams...

Hi Mark,Sorry, I've been replying mostly over at our forums...I'm not sure what's happening with your payments, as PayPal are the ones who currently handle credit card processing, you may want to try calling them or emailing them and hopefully they'll be able to sort out the problem. I'll look in to getting Google Pay set up as an alternative option... If paypal doesn't work we can look at other approaches for you and can get you all set up...In terms of difference between ProVFR and VFR+VFR+ is 1m (3ft) per pixel for imagery on the ground and is the base cover for the USAProVFR is 30cm (1ft) per pixel for imagery on the ground and is much higher resolution and looks much better in sim.Basically ProVFR is 16 times more detailed imagery than VFR+ (i.e. for one pixel at VFR+ resolution there are 16 pixels covering the same area in ProVFR).For VFR+ Utah, the 5m mesh is already included. It's not the NEXTMap ProMesh data but it is very very good, although it has some flaws. We're still awaiting the water data for Utah and that is scheduled by the end of this year and in the meantime we're thinking about just adding in the public domain water data as a stop gap until our high res water data becomes available. NEXTMap ProMesh Utah should hopefully be available by Q4 2009.With the PreOrder status, we launched the series in early 2008 as no one was providing the type of photoscenery in terms of both detail and coverage that we were planning. Due to the massive amount of programming needed to be done we wanted FS users to be able to have access to what we have "in house" as we're developing it, very reduced prices. This has helped us to capitalize and invest in equipment needed to move us towards mass coverage of the USA and we're just a few steps away from being able to finalize our processes and begin mass production.Right now we're also focused on the NEXTMap ProMesh datasets for all of Europe and the USA as those datasets are becoming rapidly available and will allow us to expand to five times our rendering capacity and start full scale photoscenery production.Feel free to ask more questions, I'm very happy to help...Cheers,Dean.

Hey Mark, what email address have you been trying to use as we haven't received any email from you as yet and it'd be good to figure out what happened in our communciations system.I'll activate your forum membership manually so you can get into the forums.As Dick pointed out the blog has the latest info, the ProMesh stuff though is full release software, Oahu and Utah are still coming along, Karl our programmer was hit by a nasty trojan recently and that has slowed down production as well as all of the Europe ProMesh data becoming available.We're working on a new store and porting everyone over to the new store but it's a challenging process to make sure everyone's previous orders are linked in to the new store, which will allow for much more flexibility and discounts etc.In terms of Oahu, release is close, but it's a manual process, all the watermaps are ready to render but it all has to be hand coded. I am aiming to get her done by the end of July depending upon factors such as Typhoons and Monsoons and power working in the midst of them (This time of year in the Philippines is interesting)...Utah's water I'm looking at getting the USGS (low res water data) and adding it until the new watermask data is available later this year. On the other hand if customers are interested we might be able to give them the next VFR state for free and just wait until the end of 2009 to finalize the Utah water maps...I'm heading over to Guam in a couple of weeks for 3 days just to investigate moving our main office from Hawaii to Guam in order to streamline our operations and reduce shipping costs for customers...Please let me know if you have any more questions, I'm more than happy to help. Sorry you've had difficulties in reaching us, I'd love to know where your emails were addressed to in order to try and track down what happened there. In the meantime feel free to email support at fs dreamscapes dot com and I'll get your account activated in the forums...Cheers,Dean.

new power supply installednew videocard installedFSX DX10 all shader 2.0 effects up24fps solidNICE!!!

Yeah I've kinda come to that conclusion, I saw the 9800GT is basically the same as the 8800GTS.I only run at 1024x768 due to monitor size and video size, the main thing I'm looking at using it for is extra bang on autogen, bloom and other shader 2.0 effects... So I also have extra grunt to record videos with GammaPro (better fps and codecs than FRAPS)...The stinker is I have to go and buy a whole new Power Supply Unit because you can't find the $3 4pin to 6pin power adapters here in the Philippines, its ok though I've now got two components freed up to start building a new rig, just need to upgrade MoBo and CPU and bump the old system parts into a new case...Over here if you see something high end, you need to buy it as there's usually only one high end component that becomes available at stores in town and if you don't jump on them you end up waiting for months for the next opportunity... Crazy thing is the 8800GTS is 3x the cost of the 9800GT, go figure... I saw the 9800GT come in the other day and I was like I gotta get this now otherwise I'll not have this chance again unless I go over to Hong Kong or back to the States...:-) I'm heading to town soon to get the new power supply, hopefully will be back up and running in a few hours...

Anyone have some advice about how smooth FSX is with a 9800GT 512mb videocard and a 9800GT 512mb videocard?I've currently got an 8500GT inside and it's okay but can't run DX10 without stutters... I have the 9800GT here but need to get a new power supply in the morning...I had to go for the 9800GT because it was the only high end card available here in the Philippines in the entire city, an 8800GTX was not feasible and other high end cards aren't available either...

Hi Doug,I'll reply to you over at our forums as it'll be more appropriate there..Regards,Dean.

Hi Doug,Okay I'm catching up after a busy 24 hours...Here's what I recommend for you and a bit of info about how our system is set up...The FS Dreamscapes VFR+ Scenery consists of several elements and there's a format that can be followed:fsd_v_ut_carbon.bglFSD = FS DreamscapesV = VFR Scenery (i.e. daylight photoscenery)UT = State Name i.e. UtahCarbon = County Name i.e. Carbon, Garfield etcTo simplify the products here's what you'd likely see for say Carbon County:fsd_v_ut_carbon.bgl = daylight VFR photoscenery texturefsd_n_ut_carbon.bgl = nightlighting overlay photoscenery texturefsd_m_ut_carbon.bgl = elevation terrain mesh datafsd_a_ut_carbon.bgl = airport elevation mesh blendkslc_ade_fsd.bgl = ADE/AFCAD/AFX Airport layout data (i.e. runways/taxiways)Also when we generate the autogen they'll be "filename".AGNI may change the formatting from fsd_v_ to fsd_d_ on the next pass for the imagery as I'll likely switch the fsd_v_ to be the naming convention for the vector based files such as roads, excludes etc...In reference to your original questions what you'll want to do is grab all the fsd_m_*.bgl files and put them into a separate mesh directory and ensure it's at a higher priority than any other elevation mesh product... Here's why...In FSX the terrain system changed... In each elevation terrain BGL the file contains all levels of detail (LOD) within each file...Say you have a 5m mesh, it means it has LOD's 3 through 15... So embedded in that file are 4.75m, 9.5m, 19m, 38m, 76m models all based off the source 5m data...If you have 5m mesh data at a lower priority than say a 10m mesh product what will happen is that FSX will display LOD 3 through 14 from the 10m mesh product and then when you fly close enough to the LOD 15 tile the 5m mesh will suddenly pop in and display the 5m data...So what you want to do is have your mesh layers with the highest resolution meshes on top, with the lower resolution layers underneath... FSX displays the LOD from the mesh that is the highest priority in the scenery library...Effectively you'll want to ensure your scenery library for mesh products to look like:1m Elevation Mesh2m Elevation Mesh5m Elevation Mesh10m Elevation Mesh19m Elevation Mesh38m Elevation Mesh76m Elevation MeshThe higher resolution source elevation data retains a lot of information when downsampled to lower LOD's such as switchbacks and roads along cliffs, whereas if your source data is low resolution those details are not seen due to the low grade of the data... It's always better to have the highest res data that is dumbed down at the highest priority rather than step up from a low res source to a high res source as you get closer...If I had time I could grab some screenshots to show the comparisons between datasets and how downsampling high res data retains much more information...I'm about to do a write up on how the whole scenery engine in FSX works and how to best optimize for it...If you have any questions please just let me know, it'll help me in writing the article...Regards,Dean.

Hi guys,Sorry I'm late to this thread, I've been helping some poor people out here today with an emergency...It's about 2am here but I'll get some sleep and come back and hopefully help clear up the questions posted...It should be about 6-8 hours before I'm back online...Regards,Dean.

Dave, what an amazingly humble post, and that takes a real man to do...A post like that deserves honoring, feel free to PM me as I think you deserve something for your humility ;)

Phil just posted this link http://www.futuregpu.org/2009/01/end-of-er...flight-sim.html over at this thread http://forums1.avsim.net/index.php?showtopic=241688