As I said elsewhere there are two main commercial mesh's.
FS Global Ultimate - more than adequate, but somewhat expensive .
FSGenesis - World Terrain Mesh - the best bargain around, $25. It's slightly lower detail in some areas than FS Global Ultimate but not all that much.
There are also limited area HD mesh's such as the NEXTMESH series.
Or the NEXTMap series.
HD means more money. Sometimes MUCH more money.
I have the FSGenesis - World Terrain Mesh. Mainly because it's very cheap and it covers the entire earth. Sorta.
There is another side to the FSGenesis choice. A secret plus side.
You see, Orbx uses FS Global mesh inside of their "fat" regions. So if you buy Scotland, the Irelands, the Pacific Northwest, etc. you also get the better mesh from FS Global. Buy Australia? You get the FS Global mesh.
There are many short falls to this strategy. Taiwan, Japan, Mexico, Peru, India and a whole lot of other places will probably not get done before I die.
Still FSGenesis and others are pretty good.
But how about a very good FREE mesh?
Enter FreeMeshX.
According to them, they are using newer SRTM 3.0 data from NASA that was released last year.
Having recently installed Prepar3d V3, I gave FreeMeshX a trial as the only add-on mesh.
Of course, Prepar3d comes with the FSX built-in mesh but that leaves a lot to be desired once outside of the USA.
Europe's mesh isn't too bad, but it's below the USA mesh resolution.
Central & South America? You got to be kidding. China, Asia, and the Pacific islands - Don't make me laugh.
But this is what they say on the FreeMeshX website:
FreeMeshX LOD10 (38-m) coverage:
•North America (LOD10 Canada is released in this mesh - default USA is already LOD10, so USA is not included for the base release. An LOD11 - LOD12 USA mesh is WIP.)
•South and Central America
•Europe
•Asia
•Africa
•Australia and Oceania
FreeMeshX LOD9 (76-m) coverage:
•Antarctica
•Greenland
•Russian territories north of 60 N latitude
So most of the world is on a par, mesh wise, with the standard USA, and they're planning to improve that too.
The end result was that FreeMeshX was a small improvement in Europe compared with the standard mesh.
It even improved a little bit compared with FSGenesis.
But for the rest of the world it was a very significant improvement.
Remember, when you compare it to the Orbx "fat" regions, you won't see any improvements.
One caveat - I installed it as scenery. In one place I had to move it below all of the Orbx scenery. After that it looked good.
Time for Show N Tell.
This is in China - ZUXC
This comparison is with FSX "standard" mesh and the FreeMeshX. I'll let you guess which one is which.
These next two are comparing the difference between FSGenesis and FreeMeshX.
If you have a problem seeing the improvement, copy both pictures to your desktop and switch between them using your arrow keys. It'll be VERY dramatic & obvious.
Look at the bottom half of each picture.
Download these and add them to your sim. The sim it's self will always choose the one with the higher resolution.
......(no good for very low level flying like I always do)....
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