RELEASED: HD Mesh Scenery v4 for X-Plane 11

Alpilotx/ December 8, 2017/ featured, News

The wait is over, and HD Mesh Scenery v4 for X-Plane 11 is now officially released!

HD Mesh Scenery v4 can be seen as a vastly improved version of the default scenery shipping with XP11. It is using/referencing the exact same set of artwork files (textures, object, autogens, forests) which ship with XP11, so you do not need other art assets to be installed while HD Mesh Scenery v4 will also benefit from any artwork improvements (autogen, texture) coming with future XP11 versions.

The most important advantages of HD Mesh Scenery v4 are

  • The triangle mesh resolution is far higher than in the default mesh and even a bit above the level of the previous HD Mesh Scenery v3::
    • this give – obviously – better DEM (elevation data) representation (slopes, mountains etc.)
    • BUT this also vastly(!) improves the landclass data representation (which in X-Plane is very closely coupled with the triangle size in the mesh). This is most obvious with forest detail.
  • The vector data simplification is less aggressive than in the default mesh (where Laminar needed to do that to limit the overall size of the global scenery). Thus road / railroad bendings are more accurate and the same is true for rivers, shorelines (but where the OSM raw data is bad, this can’t help much either)
  • HD Mesh Scenery v4 also has the new “high buildings” feature included, which I introduced with Laminar in XP11. This puts all (well, with some filtering of not reasonable stuff from OSM)  buildings > 20m “height” or > 5 “building:levels” as some “high building” object (with a more or less correct height – as defined in OSM) in the scenery (“building:levels” are simply multiplied by 4m to get an approximate height). This usually gives most cities a much better look  (New York is a great example, where in OSM almost all buildings already have a height defined). This same approach also “imports” antennas / masts from OSM (as antenna obstacles)
  • OSM data is updated (its “date stamp” is 1st October 2017) . Which makes it newer than current XP11 default mesh data and of course much, much newer than the data in HD Mesh Scenery v3.
  • Most of the Landclass data has seen an update (which already happened with my work for the XP11 default scenery … but HD Mesh Scenery v4 can represent the high res landclass data much better)

Coverage

  • Europe (from the Canaries and Iceland in the west up to Moscow an and most parts of Israel in the East)
  • North America (USA, Alaska, Canada)
  • South / Central America
  • Australia
  • Japan
  • Hawaii and most of the tiny Pacific Islands
  • Himalaya

(Coverage to the north ends at 73 N !)

And a Warning!

The scenery requires at least X-Plane 11.00 !!! IT WILL NOT WORK WITH X-Plane 10.xx!

Screenshots

Here are the official screenshots accompanying the release of HD Mesh Scenery v4. Just follow the links to my Google Photos albums:

Official Site

All other (continuously updated) information, download links and important instructions can be found on the official HD Mesh Scenery v4 Site:

Share this Post