confused newbie mesh and scenery???

I want to download some reaslistic scenery, however Im a bit stuck and confused on what i have to purchase

e.g. on fs geneis site i see terrain mesh and nextmap?? what are the differences

I also see ultimate terrain X europe ....is this just scenery or mesh

megascenery earth http://www.megasceneryearth.com/store/cart.php?target=product&product_id=861&category_id=175

does this include meshes is it compatible with fs genesis??

hope someone can explain as the sites themselves selling the products dont really explain much about what you need

Did you take a look at the thread I linked into your other question? Might answer some.

As for your questions here:

- FS Genesis offers only mesh. The difference in the products is mesh resolution, as a rule NEXT is higher resolution => better elevation model => higher price

- Ultimate terrain products are landclass and vector data. These are used if you do not fly photoreal products but want a "realistic" sim nevertheless. They approximate where things are in real life (forests, cities, roads, coastlines, rivers, lakes) but they can not show the same accuracy as photoreal of course. But you get trees and houses and nice lighting instead.

- Megascenery earth is photoreal textures only. No mesh or anything else. They state this quite clearly.

As a rule, do not assume anything with payware. What they do not explicitly write in the product description is simply not there.

Recommended is a good basic mesh addon, like FS Global Ultimate, FSGenesis or even the Free Mesh X Global.

What you put on this mesh, you will have to decide - photoreal or generic (=MegaSceneryEarth or UltimateTerrain/ORBX). You can of course get both, and fly photoreal in summer and generic in winter (because with photoreal there are no seasons!).

What you need is entirely up to you. You should do a bit of research and try out a few freeware offerings of the various scenery types (photoreal or generic) and then decide which one suits your type of flying - and (very important) the power of your PC. All addons take their toll on the sim, and some scenery types need a lot of processing power. Your sim may not run well anymore with them active.

What kind of PC are you running FSX on and what are your settings?

thanks again for your reply,

My PC is i7 4790l quad core

2 x nvidea geforce 980 graphics cards

32gb ram

1tb ssd drive

OK, with this system you will not have problems. You will hit the FSX performance wall eventually, then we can talk about tweaking ;) Btw. SLI does not really work for FSX, you may get micro stuttering. Not right away, but maybe later when you start to stress your GPUs more (one of the 980s would be more than enough acutally).

If you really want to get into photoreal you should factor in a second SSD of the same size at some point. I dropped in an additional SATA controller as well, so there is no fighting for resources internally. I have Win7, FSX, tools, airplanes and airports on one 1 TB SSD and "countryside" - scenery and mesh on a second one of the same size. Works pretty well so far.

OK. Too fast. Word of advice: take it easy and start slowly. This hobby can get very expensive very fast. I spent a good 3000€ on Europe scenery software alone (photoreal, vector, airports, night lighting, mesh). But I started out slowly, like most simmers did. I looked around for freeware stuff for the country where I live and the country where my parents lived, as I traveled this route by air quite often and I know the looks and the terrain by heart. At some point this brought me into the payware realm. So I started to constantly look around what offerings there were in the geographical regions I was interested in, either because I traveled there or simply because I watched a nice aviation video about it.

The FSX portfolio is so vast now, that there is no "fire and forget" solution. You should start somewhere with freeware, see how everything works and how serious you want to get with it. Find out what your requirements are, where you want to take this. Maybe the freeware route is for you, as it is for many a simmer. They like hangars brimming with airplanes and find pleasure in the work of the dedicated enthusiasts. Or you want to take the payware road, ever so often looking at the new payware offerings, study the forum threads about these products, watch some youtube videos. Buy it when you are certain (or when it is on sale :) )

Also, there are quite a few threads out there from people asking "what are the best addons for newbies". I suggest you study them, then look at the recommended addons. There is a lot more to the sim than only scenery, you may want some of the fantastic airplanes, weather and cloud enhancements, camera or realism addons, ATC, voice control, ships, birds... the list is endless really.

If you go into the forum section of ORBX (you don't need to register to look around at the top level) and go into the first thread, the Welcome thread, you will find a link to a User Guide for their products.

http://www.orbxsystems.com/forum/forum/66-welcome-youre-our-guest-please-register-an-account-to-view-all-forums/

That guide provides perhaps the best available explanation of the relation between mesh and terrain products.

Tim

Just a further clarification, since you really do sound confused: mesh is just the shape of the terrain, mountains, hills valleys, rolling hills, etc. Think of a wire mesh shaping a model (diorama, perhaps) layout.

Photo real is good from high altitudes, but at low levels it's blurry and just looks like something painted on the ground (some are better than others, though). Probably the biggest advantage to something like Ultimate Terrain is that roads, rivers, lakes etc. are in the proper places and have the proper shapes, rather than rough approximations such as the default has. It also modifies the land class, that is, where forests are, where desert, rocky ground, sand, towns, crops, etc. are.

Two other questions you need to decide. Are you going to be flying with charts or topo maps and need fully accurate scenery locations? If so, you need photoreal scenery.

Or are you someone who likes to fly low VFR or STOL? If so, you'll probably be very disappointed with photoreal. The closer you are to ground level, the worse photoreal works. So for low VFR or STOL I suggest you look at some ultimate terrain such as that sold by ORBX. Everything looks much more three dimensional the lower you go with that format. But the boundaries, rivers, etc. are not always exactly where you'd expect to find them using a topo map.

BTW: One tip I found very useful either way. When you on short "sightseeing flights," turn your sliders to the right for more detail. But if you're going on a long trip, flying IFR, flying high, etc. slide your sliders back left. You won't see much highway traffic, or pleasure craft, or complicated ground detail at 30,000.' So back the sliders off and free up memory space so you don't get a OOM (Out of Memory) message three hours into a three hour & fifteen minute flight! :cool: