X-Plane 10 HD Mesh Scenery v2 released!

[alpilotx]

X-Plane 10 HD Mesh Scenery v2 released!



The free (donationware!) X-Plane 10 HD Scenery Mesh v2 has been released after almost a year of work. It covers many of the "interesting" regions of the planet (over 55 Gbytes of data), covering:

• Europe (Iceland and Canaries included)
• USA (Hawaii included)
• Canada (most parts of it)
• Alaska

A coverage map can be found here:

 

It is an update to the older v1 HD Mesh (and a replacement of the default Global Scenery) and brings a lot of improvements to the simulator:

• It is a much higher resolution base mesh (more, smaller triangles) compared to the default Global Scenery which ships with X-Plane 10 (one could say: approximately 2-3-times more dense)
• The higher resolution mesh allows for a much more detailed representation of the elevation profile of the landscape
• The higher resolution mesh allows a much more detailed/exact representation of the underlying landclass data (because of the smaller triangles, which can follow landclass changes in the raw data more closely)
• It is based on a completely new Openstreetmap (OSM) data (approximately end of September 2013), which brings (compared to default Global Scenery) a lot of improvements in:
  • water features (lakes, rivers, coastline) - many previously missing water features are now finally there
  • roads
  • railroads
  • power lines
  • urban park areas
• It includes line rivers from OSM (not just polygons as before) tagged waterway=river which improves the landscape in most regions quite a bit
• Uses improved urban zoning (thanks to improved algorithms in the scenery generator)
• Many smaller and larger landclass data improvements
  • completely replaced the landclass data for Canada (big improvements)
  • improved forest density representation in Europe (changed the sparse / dense classification)
  • some new classes added (in many regions), like: moraines, riverbeds, mining/dump sites
  • added differentiation between ice (perennial) and snow (more temporal) to have an even more detailed representation of mountains
  • dded differentiation between irrigated / non-irrigated crops (in some regions - like the USA etc.)
• Completely replaced the elevation data with viewfinderpanoramas.org (if yew have a few cents, donate to that guy!). This doesn't changes much in areas which were already great, but fixes some which were really hosed.

One important prerequisite: to make this scenery work, you MUST have at least X-Plane version 10.25 (beginning with 10.25 beta1)!

A large selection of screenshots can be found here:

• Europe: https://picasaweb.google.com/101666907909842492197/XPlane10HDMeshSceneryV2EuropeFINAL?authuser=0&authkey=Gv1sRgCNKp646D4Ynscw&feat=directlink
• North America: https://picasaweb.google.com/101666907909842492197/XPlane10HDMeshSceneryV2NorthAmericaFINAL?authuser=0&authkey=Gv1sRgCLCalPCK1MD6vAE&feat=directlink

All informations, possible updates, installation instructions, and download links can be found here:

 

I would recommend you to start with 1 or 2 smaller regions first. Install it, test it, and only then come back later for more. Don't expect to have all of the scenery at once!

http://www.alpilotx.net/downloads/x-plane-10-hd-scenery-mesh-v2/

And a I would to thank www.flightsim.com for making it possible to host a project of this size!

Andras Fabian
www.alpilotx.net
 

[JohnMAXX]

Grabbing PA right now!  Thank you so much Andras Ill do my best to help spread the word.......

[skiflyzander]

WOW, Donationware? THANK YOU. Starting a download of Northern Utah now, excited to check it out. Thanks for all of your time developing it  

[Hueyman]

What you are doing is very very honorable mate, really

[JohnMAXX]

What you are doing is very very honorable mate, really

 

 

Dude you know it, I love mesh.....again being able to see features like glacier trails, from the ice age, or more details on a volcano really add to the feeling of immersion when flying.......

[alpilotx]

One thing guys. Please be so kind, and DON'T KILL FLIGHTSIM.COM ! Please, everybody start with one or two - smaller - regions and test it before you - slowly - continue! Thank you!

[scubajuan_new]

Andras you are the man! Dude seriously, the coverage blows my mind. I'm so happy to se that most of Mexico es covered and Cuba too. This might change the order of the sceneries in development. And for sure I will be flying in the Alps in the near future. Will start with Mexico and Cuba though

[chris k]

Thanks Andras

 

You are a Legend in the X-Plane community.

 

- CK.

[scubajuan_new]

One question pops in my mind. You mention that it replaces the default global scenery, but the default global scenery remains installed. Is there a way to unisntall or delete the defaul, and only keep the HD version installed? I have X-Plane in a laptop with a SSD and the storage real state is precious.

[chris k]

Yes - Since these are "terrain DSFs" - X-Plane stops looking for further DSFs for that tile; and will ignore any DSFs in the "Global Scenery/" directory where there is overlap.

 

You could delete the original "global scenery/" DSFs (one by one) where you have duplicates - and XP10 will operate correctly. Should help with your SSD storage issue and allow you to trim out the older/original files.

 

- CK.

[Push_IT_Up]

Hats off to you Andras, thank you for your continual dedication and contribution to X-Plane.

[Jim Kallinen]

No worries Andras, will wait a week or so before attempting to download anything. Your work is really appreciated among the entire X-Plane community.

 

BTW, please make your donations to keep Andras and family fed.

Edited November 23, 2013 by Jim Kallinen

[Robert149]

Wow ! Those images are amazing ! But what kind of computers are you guys using! I would imagine my 2011 imac would get about 1 frame per second or less ! I guess it time to upgrade again :-)

[Colin S]

Hawaii is even better now. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Also, thank you. I wish I had a computer powerful enough to use this stuff. Time to sell the car and mortgage the dog.

[cabnz1]

Wow - Thank you so much for this :)

[AtomicFrawg]

Good Job! Today is a good day!

Edited November 23, 2013 by AtomicFrawg

[alpilotx]

For all of those, who might have problems with download speeds: even though it sounds like advertising (but no, nobody pays me for this!), I can recommend you to take a FIrst Class membership at flightsim.com. For $30 (for one year - which is less than many, single add-ons cost, and you also support a community site which is here since over 20 years), the download limits are removed. Then the only limiting factor is, that other - possibly hundreds?? - users share the complete bandwidth of the site (but I have seen 400-500 KByte/sec speeds ... some have even reported up to 1 MByte/sec for some time periods). So, you can either pay with your time or you money ... I think, this is halfway fair (but its hard to make it more fair, when talking about data volumes of this magnitude ... sorry).

[AtomicFrawg]

Alpilotx,

 

I would have much rather given you the $30 for better DL service or paid for a subscription to DL from a site you setup. In this case, I wish they would give you a cut of the money brought in DLing your meshes.

Edited November 23, 2013 by AtomicFrawg

[alpilotx]

The thing is: this way its not me, who has to take care of payments / memberships / sales etc. ... Time which I don't have, and the little time I have is much better spent on working on scenery projects / helping Laminar etc . So in my eyes, its a fair offering, and I see it as a fair price for a service which they provide me and you (and you can download everything else over the time period of one year at high speeds too ... its quite likely, that this is not the only big scenery pack which might come over the next year). I really don't begrudge them the money which you give them ... (and remember, flightsim.com is not just some shady tiny site, but maybe one of the first internet sites for flight simulation ... since 1996 ... or so).

[AtomicFrawg]

I understand, I have been around that site a very long time and in my FS days spent a crap ton of money at the pilotshop. So, now I am a firstclass member =)

[scubajuan_new]

I am experiencing problems to download even a single tile. for some reason the download gets interrupted and fails, when i try to restart it goes back to the beginning and fails again and again. I tried with a download manager (FLOX for mac) but it fails to capture the download from flightsim.com. something about cookies. I could not find in the documentation or the preferences how to allow cookies in FLOX. 
Does anybody have a recommendation for a download manager for Mac that will allow me to download this precios files?
I found at the org some torrented tiles but unfortunately not the ones I am interested most. Eventually would like to have the full coverage but not in big rush. 
Thanks

[Mario Donick]

You either have to buy flightsim.coms premium membership, or try again and again until it works (best without doing other Internet stuff while downloading to not interrupt the download), or you wait until more torrents are available.

[cruster]

I am experiencing problems to download even a single tile. for some reason the download gets interrupted and fails, when i try to restart it goes back to the beginning and fails again and again. I tried with a download manager (FLOX for mac) but it fails to capture the download from flightsim.com. something about cookies. I could not find in the documentation or the preferences how to allow cookies in FLOX. 

Does anybody have a recommendation for a download manager for Mac that will allow me to download this precios files?

I found at the org some torrented tiles but unfortunately not the ones I am interested most. Eventually would like to have the full coverage but not in big rush. 

Thanks

 

Same issue. The download speed is incredibly slow (11 hours for a 1GB file from flightsim.com vs. about an hour for me to download about 10x that from ableton.com grabbing Live 9 packs) and horribly unreliable. I don't have a complaint about the throughput, as I just let it run overnight. It's disappointing that the connection is flaky and unstable, though. Maybe I'll try this out in a month or so after the mad rush (?) has ended.

 

I do appreciate the effort that went in to creating the scenery, though, and look forward to checking it out later.

[liser]

People is starting to share the files via torrent. You can find them here (not all the files yet): http://jbcarey.wordpress.com/2013/11/24/hd-mesh-v2-find-torrents

[alpilotx]

Hi guys ... please - if in doubt - read my statement on my download page about the download speeds (and your options). I have also added a few - 3rd party - torrent links further down the page (they are NOT done by me, so don't ask me for support about this)!