Mesh Scenery Add-on

Freeware and payware sceneries by Raimondo Taburet

By Andrew Herd (24 March 2001)

he release of the FSterrain tool brought with it a new era in Flight Simulator's history, because it suddenly became possible for amateur designers to process public domain mesh data in order to create scenery add-ons. The first scenery to be released was mostly for the USA, largely because the GTOPO30 data which FSterrain crunches is most detailed for North America. The data itself can be downloaded for nothing from the USGS EROS Data Center, and it is based on eight different sources of elevation information, including vector and raster data sets.

Elevations in GTOPO30 are spaced at approximately 1 kilometer intervals if you take the data as a whole, but there is quite considerable variation in the resolution. The best way of thinking of this is that there is a fine mesh for the US and a coarse one for everywhere else, which is a key concept in understanding which areas will look better with mesh add-ons and which will not.

The grand-daddy of all add-on meshes is undoubtedly Eddie Denney's RealScene FS payware scenery, which covers the entire globe and is sold with an installation routine which replaces the default MS scenery .bgl files. This is an elegant solution to the alternative of installing the mesh as a conventional scenery add-on, which eats entries in the scenery.cfg file. Given that there is an undocumented upper limit to the number of entries in scenery.cfg of about 350 (after which FS2000 begins to do some very strange things) Eddie's installation method is probably the only good solution for installing a global mesh. But many people do not want to install global mesh scenery, and the increasing number of European meshes appearing on FlightSim.Com means that there are some good alternatives available. This review looks at Raimondo Taburet's mesh, which is available as a combination of freeware on FlightSim.Com and cheap payware.

The reason I got looking at alternative European sceneries was that several users had contacted me about a problem with the RealSceneFS mesh. While it is very good indeed for inland areas, there is a problem with coastlines. For some reason, the compiler setting which Eddie uses causes frequent deep pits to occur near water. Eddie ascribes this to missing data and he may well be right, but there are several other meshes available which do not exhibit this phenomenon and Raimondo's is one of them. I have been flying with this scenery installed for several weeks now and I have yet to see a single pit, so if you have been reluctant to buy the RealSceneFS package because of them, this new mesh is worth considering.

What is Raimondo's mesh like? Well, it has all the advantages and disadvantages of other meshes; the detail is good, but there is a price to pay in frame rates. The screen shots in this review all show the default scenery at top and the mesh at bottom, and I have deliberately chosen a spread of different areas. Microsoft's scenery is startlingly good in some places, so good that installing mesh makes hardly any difference, while in others mesh transforms the whole look of flight simulator. In general, flat areas with gentle undulations like southern England and Ireland are hardly affected by installing mesh, while countries like Norway (top screen shot) are completely different. There are some surprises, because in some places, as the screen shot of Alpine France (above) shows, the generally angular Microsoft scenery is not bad at all.

As I alluded to above, the one thing that add-on mesh sceneries have yet to offer is a significant enhancement to gently undulating landscapes like the British Isles. Northern Europe falls within the "coarse" area of the GTOPO30 data, which means that the data quality simply isn't good enough to capture subtle features like the cliffs of Dover, the North Yorkshire moors and dales, or the Lake District. Instead of the intricate landscapes which are behind the attraction of these ancient geological formations, GTOPO30 derived mesh shows a "shorthand" relief. Whole ranges of hills vanish, and where there should be narrow winding valleys with steep grassy slopes you are treated to wide plains with gentle hills instead. This brings an entirely different flavor to the countryside, which isn't that much different to the default scenery, as the screen shot here shows. Even the Scottish glens and the Welsh valleys are flattened by the "GTOPO30 effect" and unless someone knows how to extract previously hidden detail from these data, I suspect that a true rendition of the British countryside is going to escape us. On the other hand, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland, with their dramatic mountains, are unrecognisable with mesh installed.

Raimondo is releasing new mesh on a regular basis. While much of his effort is directed at Europe, he has ranged widely about the world, and at the time of writing he had made available:

France and Corsica (freeware)
Finland, Sweden, Norway, Ireland, Faeroe Island and Iceland ($8.49)
Switzerland (freeware)
UK (freeware)
Portugal, Spain, Gibraltar, Ceuta, Andorra and the Pyrenees (freeware)
Balearic Islands And Corsica (freeware)
Himalayan mountain regions of Pakistan, northern India, Nepal, Bhutan and northwest China ($9.49 - shown in screen shot opposite)
Kilimanjaro (freeware)
Sri Lanka (freeware)
Tasmania (freeware)
Hawaii (freeware)
Middle East and Red Sea ($8.49)
California (freeware)
Hong Kong (freeware)
Bali, Lombok, Sumbawa, Flores (freeware)

I have few criticisms of make of the mesh. The quality is excellent and the frame rate impact varies from nil to about a 40% loss depending on how detailed the mesh is and how high you are flying. However, one can question the price - the RealSceneFS scenery covers the whole world for $25.00 plus shipping, while a selection of any three of Raimondo's payware sceneries, covering only a fraction of the area, would cost more, though of course there are no pits to offend the eye. The other problem is that the main server from which the payware scenery is downloaded is desperately slow at times and I found it was only usable until mid-morning GMT, but a faster mirror has been set up recently. Despite these caveats, Raimondo's scenery is well worth a look, especially if it covers your home patch.