FSGenesis 75m Mesh

By Andrew Herd (13 December 2001)

have this recurring nightmare. It is one of those dreams that keeps coming back at you again and again until you wake up in a cold sweat, fighting with the controls, only to discover that it is three a.m. In it, I open my copy of FS2010 and load it on my 12 Ghz Pentium VII and the most awful thing happens... everything is perfect! The hills look real and the co-pilot talks to me and the airports are exact duplicates of the originals down to the last blade of grass. While the stewardess gives me her telephone number and goes to make me a coffee, I frantically switch from city to city, desparately searching for errors, but there are none. All the airport elevations are correct, Prince Edward Island is above the water, the 172 flies like a real Cessna and even London's Millennium Dome is in the correct position. I develop an uncontrollable shake as I find that FS2010 is compatible with all known video cards, even the ATI Rage 19, frame rates are in the low thousands, my CH Pro pedals work with the game in native mode under Windoze ZP.

After a long moment drinking it all in, an awful realisation dawns.

There is nothing to do.

I don't need any add-ons. I don't need to replace the mesh. I don't need any new planes. Everything is completely perfect.

I shake my head. Then, knowing there is only one way to deal with it, I sling a rope over the stair rail and prepare to end it all. My gaming time is ruined. No longer will I be able to spend hours in the FlightSim.Com forums bitching about the things Microsoft got wrong. No longer will I need to wait for Gary Summons to finish his UK2000 scenery, no more will I fret while FSD and DreamFleet polish off their latest creations. There won't be any point in Naji Chehabeddine designing new bush sceneries and Yannick Lavigne and Fred Banting will no doubt be shedding a tear as they shut down their editors for the last time.

Fortunately, it is only a dream. FS2002 isn't perfect and FS2010 won't be either, assuming we all make it that far. So I anticipate many happy hours spent tweaking my copy of Flight Simulator until it is so far removed from the original that the design team will no longer recognise it. Despite the program's faults, it is a tribute to Microsoft that their game can be expanded so much and with so little effort - and one of the best places you can possibly start is with FSGenesis' new 75 m mesh. The screen shots show an FS2002 installation, but the good news is that the mesh is also compatible with FS2000.

To be absolutely fair to Microsoft, I could live with the FS2002 mesh, which, unlike the scenery in its predecessor, is an acceptable imitation of reality, with hills that have pleasantly rolling contours, rather than flats and sharp angles, and a level of detail that makes VFR flight practical in many areas. There are problems, however. The level of mesh detail varies around the globe and although it is fine in the US, it isn't in Oceana and it is questionable in many parts of Europe. To give an example (apart from the drowning of Prince Edward Island) the North Yorkshire Moors - a large upland area in the UK - are completely missing in FS2002, which makes VFR flights in Northern England a bit of a joke. The blame for this can be laid at the door of the Digital Elevation Model chosen by Microsoft, which has much lower resolution outside the continental US and appears to suffer from considerable amounts of missing data elsewhere in the world. This is something that needs to be fixed as a priority in 2004, assuming that better data can be found at a viable price.

The good news is that as long as you are prepared to go through a minimal amount of pain, it looks like third party sceneries will fix most of my concerns before 2002 is out. There are already a number of add-on mesh products available for FS2002, with several freeware sceneries already available for Flight Simulator, but one of the highest quality add-ons I have come across so far is FSGenesis' 75m mesh.

Installing the package is dead easy. All you have to do is stick the CD in a drive, wait for the autorun to bring up the install prompt and then follow the instructions. The installer searches for FS2000 first and for FS2002 as soon as it has found the earlier version before giving you the choice of which one you want to install the scenery for. In FS2002, the files are installed into the base scenery directory so that no additional entries are made in scenery.cfg, encouraging Flight Simulator to run at the fastest possible speed.

As you can see from the screen shots, the new mesh makes a considerable difference to FS2002 (I might add that it absolutely transforms FS2000). The reason for this is that except in detailed areas like the Grand Canyon, the default scenery relies on a 300m grid, resulting in contours which are rather too soft - as you can see, the 75m mesh fixes this and a minute's flight anywhere in southern Alaska is enough to prove that the difference is worthwhile. Not only is the default scenery improved, but whole new ranges of hills appear and while the effect isn't so in your face at 10,000 feet as it is at 2,500, it is always visible, though at times very subtle, as the Reno shot below shows.

Problems? In general, I found that the mesh ran remarkably smoothly and in FS2002, the impact on frame rates was relatively slight, averaging 10-15%, though this depended a great deal on location. With FS2000, if you don't have a seriously powerful machine, you have no business running 75m mesh, and I wouldn't recommend trying it on less than a 733 MHz Pentium and even then, be prepared for sudden slow-ups. The designer runs it on a 600 MHz machine, so I guess if you are prepared to make compromises you can run it on most systems.

The FS2002 terrain engine is subtly different to its predecessor and add-on mesh no longer produces the hilarious flying lakes and roads that were so amusing in FS2000. However, it brings a new problem, because every now and then you will come across a sloping lake, or a place where the water is running up a vertical cliff. This is very variable and in the worst affected areas about one in four lakes are affected, but in many places it is hard to find any evidence of the problem at all. According to Justin Tyme at FSGenesis, "These new 'lake' polygons are very similar to the FS2000 FE_COAST opcodes, which were fairly easy to work with. They basically consist of water-textured flatten polygons with an elevation parameter. However, the new opcodes add various things like the multi-texturing (moving water), "wave-effect" and float-plane wakes. Once the SDK is released documenting these new opcodes, it should be just a matter of adjusting the elevation parameters for the lakes in question... it won't be a wave of the magic wand, voila, type-of-thing, but I know it will be fixable once the implementation of the new opcodes is documented. I will say with absolute certainty that it will be fixable, but I wouldn't say a patch is imminent at this point. A small and freely downloadable patch would probably come within a couple/three weeks of the FS2002 Scenery SDK, whenever that is."

Do I like the new scenery? You bet. Having installed the United States and the Alaska-Yukon CDs, I am eagerly awaiting the remainder of the series. FSGenesis are planning to cover the rest of the world with high-res mesh once new data becomes available. According to Justin, "I plan to release continental 75m Terrain CDs and I'm hopeful I can get 6-8 new CDs out this coming year, depending on the JPL/NASA release schedule." This is pretty exciting news because it means that at long last Flight Simulator users are going to have access to affordable high quality mesh that doesn't kill frame rates absolutely stone dead and which is will make VFR a practical proposition world wide. Who knows? It may even get us back the North Yorkshire Moors and PEI. I've given up hope on the Millennium Dome, but at least I'm in no danger of having that damned nightmare again.

Test machines: 733 MHz Pentium, 256 Mb RAM, GeForce2 32 Mb, Windows Me and 1.7 Ghz Pentium, 512 Mb RAM, GeForce3 64 Mb, Windows XP.

The single engined aircraft shown in this review is the FSD C115.

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