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If you’ve survived downloading the rather large 10.25 patch and you want to download even more data, good news!  Alpilotx has just released version 2 of his X-Plane HD Mesh Scenery.

His scenery pack is a donation-ware recut of North America and Europe.  Alpilotx’s HD scenery use the latest OSM and other global data sources, and are cut with the latest DSF generator; thus they contain better DSF generation with newer data.  Alpilotx then cranks the mesh settings well beyond what we can ship with the global scenery (which must fit on a DVD set and not fill an entire SSD), bringing out wonderful terrain definition and other detail that we have to cut down for the global scenery that ships as a default with the sim.

One of the cool effects of cranking up the base mesh detail: it brings new detail to the terrain shading.  In X-Plane 10 we moved the process of altering terrain with slope (from forest to grass to rock, or whatever the artist defines) from a CPU process calculated ahead of time to a shader process run on the GPU. The result is that more detailed meshes actually produce better shading, as the shading responds to the 3-d detail.

If you have a computer that can run them, these meshes look great, and they get you a source of recut DSFs now.

The recut DSFs that Laminar ships will be based on the same DSF generation code improvements and the same new data, but the resolution will be reduced to produce files of similar size to the default scenery we already ship.  We have not decided exactly how we will ship recuts; I think that really important fixes (e.g. Sydney with the harbor fixed) will be automatic updates; I don’t know about a wider scale yet.

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.

40 comments on “Add New HD Base Meshes to 10.25”

  2. Ben, will the LR recuts include new data for central and south america, as well as other areas not covered by Alpilotx HD mesh?

    Thank you.

    rleendertz SVRL

    1. Hi,

      We have new data for _everywhere_ – the question is what regions we will recut and how we will do it. I don’t know the answer, except to say that I think Rio will be on the list of ‘auto-fixes’ – basically anywhere that’s really screwed up and notable should be on the short list. This would include Sydney, Rio, Edwards AFB, etc.

      I’ll post something more complete when we’re closer to pulling the trigger.

      1. Please include Ottawa river in ‘auto-fixes’ as well. It is missing a big chunk from west-end Ottawa to somewhere close to Montreal. Approximately 100 miles. Thanks.

      3. It would epic to get the Caribbean in HD mesh. Many of the islands do not have the proper definition in the mesh to represent the terrain. Notably TFFJ in St. Barths and also Saba. These are the two most challening airports in the Caribbean and the mesh looks nothing like the real thing, so there really is no “simulation” there.

        Thank you kindly.

    2. Some of you might know it, others not. My work is usually (since many years – at least since the default Global Scenery v10) happening in very close / symbiotic cooperation with Laminar. So, when ever I make some raw data changes / improvements, or we tune some configurations for the scenery generator, that always usually goes to the central Laminar repository as well …. And vice versa, when ever Ben updates / changes / fixes something in the Scenery Generator code, it usually immediately comes back to me.

  3. Might be a silly question, but I presume any recut LR releases is based on what’s currently installed, correct? For example, I have only North American scenery installed since that’s where I fly. Any recut that’s released should only update the DSF for North America, on my install, correct?

    1. For any recuts included as part of the auto-update system, yes. The auto-updater only grabs scenery where you have DSFs installed. If you add/remove scenery later, you can then re-run the updater (at the end of the add/remove) to get any further patches you might have missed.

  4. This is great news. I have two questions:
    1. Will we finally get Antarctica now that you have _everywhere_
    2. With Alpilot’s scenery, will this impact on Video ram or normal ram now the move to GPU?

    1. Hi,
      1. Sorry, we haven’t increase the coverage -area- – we have new data for the entire data set we maintain. Alpilotx would have to comment on whether we actually have any sane Antarctica data, but I wasn’t planning on increasing the size of the global scenery in land area.

      2. The move to GPU was done in 10.0 – it has no impact on VRAM – it uses a little bit of GPU processing power to save a bit of CPU processing power and system memory.

      1. yes, sure. i did not mean it that way.

        anyway, let me just say that the combination of the new mesh and the new landclasses is a blast!!!

        Especially the new landclasses are extraordinary, what a great improvement. the green fields for industrial areas are gone, now major cities look as such. with some more artwork in that area, the plausible concept finally does the trick!

        10.25 is a huge step forward. congrats to the team, esp. alex for the great new textures and landclasses!!!

  6. Hi Ben!

    Have you considered to ship the new global recut on Bluray disks?

    Even if you only use single layer disks to limit cost, you could ship higher resolution meshes, of course not has high as Alpilotx ones but something in between. After all we get more and more powerful hardware and it would be nice to have a higher resolution global scenery.

    Cheers.

  7. downloading one tile now to see how it looks and performs, using simheaven photo realistic tiles for most cities anyway, so that will save much download time. The question really is , with downloading these new HD mesh tiles, when we update x-plane again will the data be over written from the installer? If so, how do we prevent that because hours of download time would be lost?

    1. If you install them in their own pack (and don’t REPLACE our tiles in Global Scenery) our installer won’t touch them.

      As a general rule: any add-on installed without replacing our files won’t be erased by the installer.
      Any add-on that requires replacing something in “Global Scenery” or “Resources” will ASK you for permission to over-write on an update.

  8. There are too many gas stations in the “cities” IMHO (counted 8 in a rather remote and small village in the alps). Will additional art assets improve this or is that baked into the DSF generator?
    Other than that the new code is quite a improvement in how villages and cities are generated. Great work!

    Flo

      1. The DSF’s do seem to affect the autogen indirectly by changing the landclass,. The ridiculous 25-storey Soviet-style apartment blocks that started popping up a couple of versions ago are much less prevalent with the HD 2.0 mesh, though they still show up often enough to be really distracting.

        1. I made a mod on the .org that is a temp fix for the apts… basically made the obj sunk into the ground..

  9. Will there be any further work to the clouds ? I would love to see some towering cumulus clouds in the sim!

  10. Hey Ben,
    This question is actually about HDR performance,are you going to do some optimizations to it in 10.30?
    HDR looks awesome,especially with SKY MAXX PRO,but when they are together the FPS decreases dramatically.

    1. We have some optimizations we can make, but if you are -not- using anti-aliasing and your HDR rendering is still slow, you may need to cut screen size or get a bigger GPU.

      1. thx for response Ben!
        I’m using 4xsaa+FXAA,and the AA when HDR is on is killing my performance and not the HDR itself.

        1. Yep – the 4x means HDR is doing literally 4x the work it would otherwise be doing.

          We can theoretically take better advantage of the hardware when it comes to 4x AA; we will _not_ reach this point by 10.30 – 10.30 is an intermediate step in working through a series of OpenGL changes, so it will take at least one more major patch after that. But I do think we’ll get to try the hw MSAA in HDR mode within the v10 run.

          It is possible that the hw MSAA won’t be any faster – or at least I should say – since we have not measured the hw MSAA in HDR mode even under experimental conditions, we don’t know what the speed up is. We strongly suspect the hw MSAA will be better than what we do (just draw at 4x) though, so there should be some win…it might be big, it might be small.

    1. No timeframe – it’s an incremental process and it has, to some extent, already happened. We’ll make a step forward with 10.30, but it might not be done by then; we’ll make a step forward when we get more auto-gen assets too, whenever that is.

    1. Hi Nino,

      Alex and I looked at a lot of options when working on the autogen roads and concluded that based on current mesh tech, what we do is the least bad option. Basically the sim right now can’t dynamically flatten the terrain in small areas at the resolution needed for the roads; we looked at including ‘retaining walls’ in the roads but the result was much more distracting than what we have now. This is also compounded by the base mesh not always being accurate enough in the source data.

      So someday we would like to be able to ‘bulldoze’ the ground a bit under the roads – but that would require a substantial change to how the engine works; furthermore, even if we had this, the question of how to know how to bulldoze is extremely complicated. We don’t get good elevation data off of the road data, so how do we know how far to ‘bury’ the road (and cut the ground) to get correct behavior for example, when the road is in a trench (which happens quite often for US highways in cities)?

  13. I have a question concerning the road data inside XPlane / the new HD mesh. When overlaying orthophoto scenery I notice a lateral shift of the roads that you don´t see when using autogen terrain. At first I thought that the orthos weren´t precise enough but when adding osm buildings from simheaven, those are all in place which rules out the wrong-ortho theory. My question is if the road data is not that precise and if one should use additional road data for perfect fitting roads. This is an example just east of 25C in EDDF.
    http://250kb.de/u/131128/j/p3cPiuIvcY2U.jpg

    1. For the default global scenery, some simplification of road data DOES happen; I don’t know if what you see is an error in OSM, our simplification’s limits, or a bug in the orthophotos; I also don’t know how Andras’ HD mesh changes the simplification (if at all).

    2. Hmmm … this screen shot seems to be more than just a simplification issue. Usually, those roads shouldn’t be that much off … expect, if they are already at a quite bad “quality level” in OSM (that can happen – OSM make no promises about quality, and can have very big differences therein).

      But the OSM data around EDDF is really really good …
      http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/50.0512/8.6030

      This screen shot looks like, as if your scenery would use something entirely different!
      If I look at the same location in HD Mesh, then I get a more or less exact representation of the OSM data abov (and definitely miles better than what your picture suggests):
      https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-d5tu11eJJr0/UpkRbqhAxOI/AAAAAAAADyc/PnXFkVVtsuo/s800/Eclipse_1.jpg

      I definitely recommend, that in situations like this, you double check what exactly you have installed and have running (very often people ask, why this or that is not so great in HD Mesh etc. … just to find out,that they are not even looking at it).

      1. I could finally figure it out. The thing causing the road-offset was the orthophoto scenery I created long ago with g2xpl. I tried to remove a bunch of stuff but never expected orthos to contain road data (or data interfering with roads). After Disabling them in scenery.ini everything looked good again. Thanks anyway for sharing your thoughts!

  14. I know the DVDs are a big hassle and a limiting factor for distribution. Has there been any consideration to releasing X-plane for download via torrents as an alternative to snail mail disks? I found that was the easiest and quickest way to get the X-Plane 10 HD Scenery Mesh v2 (which is fantastic by the way).

    1. We have more than considered it … we once _tried_ it. Albeit this was a long time ago, but the results were _not_ a good. Basically a huge chunk of our user base wasn’t torrent-savvy and was really annoyed that downloading wasn’t click-and-go. This is why we built our installer with multiple servers backing it.

  15. The HD mesh v2 is really amazing!
    Are you going to fix some mesh issues in the middle east? for ex. there is a hill in Tel Aviv that should not be there,and there are some issues like this one…

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