FSX
I don't know if any of you have used a mesh scenery product such as FS Genesis. The Ultimate terrain series does a little mesh work, but basically the smaller the distance between samples, the more accurate the terrain is.
FS Dreamscapes offered it's "Pro Mesh" series for Oklahoma recently and being from Oklahoma and relatively conversant with both the terrain and airports here, I couldn't wait to get my hands on the product. See Wiley Post for FSX (KPWA) at your local free download site (shameless plug). The product claimed 5 meter resolution over the entire state. I couldn't get my credit card out fast enough.
To be sure, no one actually needs 5M resolution mesh (vertical resolution is approximately +- 1 Meter) unless you're a scenery geek or government agency. I would fall into the former category as in my previous occupation, colliding with waves on the ocean (unless they were abnormally large) did not have the same disasterous effects as colliding with the ground does for aviators. Understand: 5 meter resolution gives you over 150 height samples on an acre of ground.
The accuracy of the mesh is both a blessing and a curse.
The good, the bad, and the ugly:
The Good:
Of course the first thing I did was to go to places that I could normally recognize by their look. Success! I went to southeastern Oklahoma looking for the Kiamichi River Valley and sure enough, I could pick out geographic points I've known my entire life just by their shape. Among these were Big and Little Buffalo, the Potato Hills, the Kiamichi Mountains, the Stairstep Mountains, and the list goes on. There were the right number of valleys between promontories, and when you're used to using the landscape for direction ("You'll go over two rises, and just about the top of the third, you need to bear right into...." you get the picture) that's just erie. The accuracy was outstanding!
The Bad:
The chances of land around airports actually being flat is exactly zero, and the software doesn't care. If you have a mesh package for Flight Simulator X, it seems to me that you should at least offer a blending function for the existing airports with a maximum rise/fall around the airport flattens to let the rest of the scenery blend in. Not so. EVERY airport I went to, including Will Rogers, Wiley Post, OU Westheimer, Tinker AFB, Vance AFB, Altus AFB, Ada Municipal, Tulsa, and OK81 either had plateaus or were sunken in a hole. This software seemed to be a simple regurgitation of someone's high accuracy DEM data as far as blending goes. I hovered at the end of Tinker's North-South runway and varied the mesh resolution from 5M to 38M before the scenery heights blended enough to look semi-natural. So if you want things to look smooth, you might as well use the FSX default mesh. I believe the default is already sampled at 38 Meters in the area...but it may be 78.
The Ugly:
After two hours of flying I received my first EVER Out of Memory error in FSX. I'm running 4 gigs of OCZ dominator DDR1200 memory on the Gigabyte (Ted's favorite} Mobo, with an Intel 9650 quad ciore and a ATI 4870 OC'd vid card. The power supply is an OCZ 850 Watt gaming supply. I verified that the addressable memory extension mod was active as well. OS is XP Pro 32 bit. There's something just not right there.
Conclusion:
I'll probably uninstall FS Dreamscapes Pro Mesh Oklahoma until Dreamscapes comes up with some blending and addresses the memory problem. That's about $35.00 lost, but maybe you won't make the same mistake after this review.
The pictures below are the default Tinker AFB runway 17 between 5m and 38M mesh settings in FSX. The road in the foreground would be I 40. No other scenery or terrain enhancements are installed.
Jim
Originally Posted by ST0RM
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