British Isles Mesh Publisher: Taburet

Review Author: Paul & Hilary Mort Suggested Price: $18.99

Welcome to a new product from Taburet - British Isles Mesh for X-Plane 11. For this article, I thought it was time to step up to the plate (mainly out of sheer curiosity), and compare this mesh wizardry with the default elevations and textures of X-Plane 11. We will be exploring the four elements of this package, that being: City, Country, Mountains and lastly Coasts, and finding out if it is indeed an improvement, and if so, by how much, from what X-Plane 11 provides by default.

Installation

At first, I had two things on my mind. Would I have to overwrite masses of files and back them up, and also, how much drive space would it take to accommodate the package! The answers to both my questions were 'no' and 'not much'.

Having downloaded and unpacked the software, I was provided with four folders, namely Mesh XP British Isles, Mesh XP British Isles Buildings, Mesh XP British Isles overlays, and Mesh XP British Isles Trees, which were simply copied to the Custom Scenery folder of X-Plane 11. One important thing to do/remember, is to move the folder structure of the scenery_packs.ini, so that the four above folders are placed below all your custom airports. The drive space required for all four, was in the order of 1 GB.

With installation complete, it was time to boot up X-Plane 11 and go flying.

Cities

To check the cities of this package, there is no bigger city in the UK than its capital, London! Selecting runway 27 of EGLC London City Airport, which faces this vast metropolis, I was ready and eager to take to the skies. On takeoff, I was expecting to see quite a few buildings, but not on the magnitude on what I was about to experience! Extracted from the latest Ordinance Survey mapping, were literally thousands of buildings of every type, from skyscrapers to warehouses, offices to houses, there was so much to see - even into the distance. Expecting my processor to melt at any moment, I checked the frame rate of X-Plane 11 to find an amazing 20 FPS. The flight was both smooth and with zero lag; a real credit to the developer!

Now I know what you're probably thinking, what kind of super computer does this guy own? Well actually, by today's standards, it's quite modest...

Intel i5 3.10 GHz processor with an Nvidia GeForce GTX650 graphics card and 16 GB of RAM.

The quality of the Taburet buildings is perfectly acceptable, with good texturing all around, but I remember thinking on my first flight that to me, the roof colors of the buildings looked strange in their red, brown, green and orange texturing. But with further use, I came to realise that they were actually more discernible than the default buildings at an altitude of 2,000 feet and above. As you can see from the numerous screen shots, even with X-Plane's default ground texture set, it is a marked improvement. However, to get the very best out of this package, a freeware or payware photo scenery would be preferable.

Cityscape of London

This first category then, Cities, was a test of their quality, quantity and also performance, which I'm pleased to say, all passed with flying colors.