Interesting FS scenery addon.

[chris]

http://www.fsimcafe.com/Reviews/ShowReview.aspx?ReviewID=23

Pricey addon, but it looks mighty impressive. :)

[Justin Martin]

Hmm, very nice. -^ The system requirements aren't too bad, other than harddrive space:

PC 1.7 GHz or higher
256Mb RAM (512Mb for XP)
64Mb grpahics card
16Gb Hard drive space for full install

Do the newer versions of FS use LOD models?

[chris]

LOD models for planes, I don't know about scenery, I think it is only partially displayed.

[Frank N. O.]

Am I right in assuming that all FS scenery mesh is made up of square polygonswith even spacing and fixed mapping like NFS-tracks has, it sure looks like it when you see the sharp edges and stretched textures on cliff-edges.

Btw, am I crazy or did one of the big scenery-makers say they wanted to make a whole add-on to turn the earth in FS into the moon? It was a few months ago and after thinking about it must've been a april fools joke for a number of reasons, however I've tried to search and couldn't find it, and somehow I remember it was not april 1st I saw it.

Frank

[Justin Martin]

Am I right in assuming that all FS scenery mesh is made up of square polygonswith even spacing and fixed mapping like NFS-tracks has, it sure looks like it when you see the sharp edges and stretched textures on cliff-edges.
Not sure about the SRTM mapping (Shuttle Radar Topography Mission) that was used for this, but most of the digital topography maps do use perfectly square quads. I'd imagine that FS's scenery comes from one of those sources.


Btw, am I crazy or did one of the big scenery-makers say they wanted to make a whole add-on to turn the earth in FS into the moon? It was a few months ago and after thinking about it must've been a april fools joke for a number of reasons, however I've tried to search and couldn't find it, and somehow I remember it was not april 1st I saw it.

Frank
I believe there is mapping for the moon that is similar to SRTM or DEM, so it wouldn't be too difficult to do that. Of course, with no atmosphere, winged aircraft aren't going to work on the moon.

[KyzrSoze]

Also, with the relative size difference between the moon and earth, all of the distance calculations based on the spheres would be way off.

[Frank N. O.]

Yeah I don't know what I was thinking :(

A shame it doesn't seem possible to make high-detail local sceneries like in Crimson Skies since that would be awesome, but you probably could if FS didn't seem to have hardcoded the format of scenery-mesh autogenerated due to the extreme size. That's probably one place where Orbiter has it easier, but probably only that one field.

Another interesting different scenery was a fictional lunar pilot mission add-on that had you starting to land a P-51 at a airfield and then navigating a custom-made ultra-high detail Flying Bedstead-looking lunar-lander learner inside a giant cube. It was shown in a big long video and the video alone looked fantastic, especially with them having the place fly thrue their logo in 3D, most likely a custom-mesh actually inside as scenery in FS.

Frank