MeshTool vs. Draped Polygons

An author asked me some questions that I think are so important that I’ll blog the answers:

• The new texture paging system (LOAD_CENTER) works for both terrain textures (.ter files) and draped polygons (.pol files). You do not have to use draped polygons to get texture paging – you can use paging in a base mesh!
• Orthophoto terrain via a (.ter) file is by far the preferred method for orthophoto sceneries – it is a vastly better option than draped polygons. Draped polygons are horribly wasteful of hardware resources, and should really only be used for tiny areas, e.g. airport surface areas. If you are using even a moderate amount of orthophotos, make a base mesh!
• MeshTool is the future of photo scenery, and will continue to be the way to make high performance orthophoto meshes for X-Plane.

The future of MeshTool is bug fixes, a richer syntax, and some day maybe a UI front-end.

About Ben Supnik

Ben is a software engineer who works on X-Plane; he spends most of his days drinking coffee and swearing at the computer -- sometimes at the same time.

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