Introduction To Terrain Mesh By Justin Tyme / FSGenesis Terrain Mesh: What It Is and What It Can Do for You I'm sure some of the old-timers can remember back to the dawning of the age of desktop flight simulators--the pool table flatness of FS4 and FS5, the synthetic tiled blobs of color that served as mountains in FS5.1 and the hand drawn 3D polygons FSGenesis created for Pennsylvania, Delmarva, and West Virginia for FS98. The floating airports that would settle down to tile-level as you approached closer to the runway threshold. The processors of the day just could not keep up with keeping track of tens of millions of elevation points, although there was a rudimentary terrain mesh system in the code. Back then it was purely visual and I remember one experiment that ended when I flew right through the terrain mesh as if it wasn't there. FS2000 brought terrain mesh into the forefront by converting a low-resolution global dataset (GTOPO30) into terrain mesh BGLs and we were able to fly over and through some sort of accurate rounded mountains with elevation points spaced more than a kilometer apart. My boo usher alicia keys.

There were some improvements to FS2002 and more higher-resolution areas in FS2004, but the high-resolution terrain mesh was pretty much left to third-party developers. And so it began with the add-on terrain mesh, as more regions were covered by ever more higher-resolution terrain. By the time FSX rolled around, most of the world was covered by at least 76m terrain mesh and many more areas of 38m terrain mesh was available and the contiguous United States and later Europe was available in 10m. So as we bask in a Golden Age of Terrain Mesh, of sorts. There are still many who have yet to partake in the profound improvements that can be achieved by the simple addition of highly-accurate, high-resolution topography, making the virtual world much closer to its real-world counterpart. What Is Terrain Mesh? This will be a simplified layman's explanation aimed at the casual simmer, but anyone wishing more technical detail, see my friend Adam Szofran's, a chief designer of the FSX terrain engine, excellent paper.

Simply stated, terrain mesh is the shape of the ground. It is the mountains, the valleys and the plains.

Apr 24, 2006 - Hello all! I have got the big SRTM mesh, 8,5gigs big, maybe you guys now it. And also, if someone has the SRTM terrain 8,5gigs, cab he tell me how to properly install it? FSX FreeMeshX Global Terrain Mesh Scenery 2.0. FS2004: FS2004 scenery world scenery or FS2004 scenery base scenery. This approach will add the data to the folders where the FS mesh files are stored.

Other elements of the terrain engine include landclass, phototextures, flatten polygons, and various lines and polygons, such as transportation elements, lakes, streams, coastlines, and airport property polygons. They all work independently and are blended together at runtime to create the scene out your window at any given moment, and FS does this many times a second. We will be focusing only on the terrain mesh portion of that mixture. The resolution of the terrain mesh generally determines its detail and accuracy. Very low-resolution terrain has a much farther distance between elevation points, sometimes up to a kilometer, which results in rounded approximations of even the most craggy mountain ranges. As the distance between elevation points decreases, the detail and accuracy increases.

This is due to an exponential increase in the number of elevation points as the distance between them decreases from 1226m to 612m to 306m to 153m to 76m to 38m to 19m to 10m. It is at the lower resolutions (38m, 19m and 10m) where detail and accuracy are brought into a sharp focus and your enjoyment of the FS environment is brought to a new level. The higher the resolution, the more detailed and accurate the terrain (output being as good as the source data).