X-plane 11 Hd Mesh Scenery V4 Download
Edelmira Hays
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 main difference is, that HD Mesh Scenery v4 does NOT use any custom orthoimagery (as used by photoscenery) but instead is based an a finite set of generic, landclass based textures coming with default X-Plane 11!
The good thing in X-Plane is, that as long as a scenery only contains data (which is the case with this scenery) it is always completely OS independent (the scenery data is identical for all OS versions of X-Plane)! Only if a scenery uses plug-ins (which this scenery does not) can you have OS dependency.
I have added a big FAQ topic to answer this question (as it is common to all of my mesh products). Read it very carefully, as it will address a lot of possible issues which you might face when deciding to make your own modifications:
We have tested this mesh scenery pack and confirm it does work in X-Plane version 12 which was released in September 2022. There may be a little issue with regard to the new 3D water effects along the coastline but this is negligible and not worth worrying over - this global scenery pack will work fine in v12.
Hot on the coattails of X-Plane 12, many new and high-quality scenery add-ons have been released. The latest edition of the X-Plane HD Mesh Scenery package by AlpilotX has just been released. This fourth edition of the HD mesh scenery package adds a whopping amount of new detail to optimize visual quality across the board.
This latest v4 scenery is a vastly improved version of the default scenery shipped with XP12/11. It's simple to install and use as it uses the same files (.dsf) as the default base scenery so simply drop them into the correct folders as explained in the README file within each package and the scenery will begin working. The scenery is compatible with X-Plane 11 on all platforms including Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Rather than trying to fit in any new custom imagery, this utilizes many default X-Plane 12 and 11 landclass textures. This means that you need less storage to keep all of the textures in place, reducing the volume of HDD space needed. It also provides a more consistent quality of texture delivery across the entirety of the scenery. This avoids those deep, unpleasant contrasts in graphical quality.
You can edit and modify the meshing if you like, so long as credit is provided to the original development team. However, many side issues can be raised when trying to self-edit such content, so be sure to check out the official FAQ.
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UHD 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 UHD Mesh Scenery v4 will also benefit from any artwork improvements (autogen, texture) coming with future XP11 versions.
The main difference is, that UHD Mesh Scenery v4 does NOT use any custom orthoimagery (as used by photoscenery) but instead is based on a finite set of generic, landclass based textures coming with default X-Plane 11!
So my first naive idea is to simply have two custom scenery folders: one for overlays and one for meshes. Every pack in the overlay folder would completely outrank the meshes folder. This idea begs a bunch of implementation questions:
Another lever we can pull is to allow scenery authors to annotate their packs (perhaps with a text file or new library.txt directive) indicating the appropriate installation ranking for the pack. This approach would be similar to automatic prioritization, except priorities would be explicit and cheap to discover.
Just wondering if ini files would be required anymore. Because of the different folders, you already know the type of the custom scenery. For airports, the order is probably not important. Same applies to libraries. For overlays and orthos the order could be important, especially with overlapping sceneries.
Ok, in that case, what if an under custom scenery we had an Airport subfolder with priority one which we would use to place very specific regional scenery (it would also accept mesh, ortho and overlay data if it is contained on the specific scenery folder), than a Mesh subfolder with priority 2 with mesh data for larger areas, so if a mesh is not found for a specific area on the P1 folder, the mesh available on this one should be used for that region, also an Ortho folder with the same priority and specs of the mesh folder for Ortho data, and for the last a Library subfolder just for organization purposes?
Personally I would prefer having 2 separate folders, one for mesh/autogen overlay scenery, one for 3rd party overlay scenery (airports landmarks etc). Additionally, it would be ideal to have the mesh folder just be read alphabetically, no ini. It would also be nice to have Global Airports being placed somewhere in resources and being inserted between Custom Mesh and Custom Scenery.
The GUI resolves more issues than you give it credit for. Retaining the current single folder (Custom Scenery) is certainly the easiest installation process for said users. The ability to then configure these packages in a GUI with search functions, shift+click selecting, and more detailed enable/disable options would resolve much frustration. Otherwise users will still get confused among the order and ranking of default scenery vs. Ortho4xp vs. overlays vs. custom meshes at airports, etc., as described in the thinly versatile scenery.ini.
Add show/hide controls to the sim configuration gui, all the rest should be defined by the scenery maker. If a scenery messes things up, pro users can still tinker with some new kind of scenery specific .ini file, and consumers will shy away from the scenery until someone fixes it.
One question is probably: if somebody has essentially all the scenery that exists, would there be more or less an order that would work? If so, then indeed the ordering could be done automatically and the fiddling with the scenery_packs.ini would not be needed any more.
I quite like the idea proposed by others here that the order is purely based on the directory names. LR could specify and document some prefixes or first characters for fine-grained alphabetical/numeric categories together with the properties of each category (as suggested above). That would make it simpler for scenery authors to select the right prefix/first letter/number.
In my case I have plenty of scenery symlinked from a separate disk which is not always mounted. XP then adapts the scenery_packs.ini, but when I launch XP the next time with the mounted disk, the scnerery_packs.ini is screwed up. I had to write a script to automatically fix the ini file. It would be great if for XP12 that would not be necessary any more.
I have only just purchased X-Plane 11 and am interested in adding better scenery for both the UK and Spain. I understand (vaguely) that scenery from different suppliers falls into two camp, based on real photographs, or computer generated, probably wrong, but something like that. Also that you cannot mix the two?????
All the Mesh you need for almost worldwide coverage is available at the link I give below.... freeware. If you look under the heading of Downloads on the site you will also see there is a special coverage area in UHD as well. I use both and the results are amazing. They work fine. Remember that any "homemade" Ortho4XP photo scenery you make will come with it's own mesh so the downloaded mesh from the linked site become irrelevant for that scenery.
Thank you JJ for the links. To be honest, I cannot fathom out what "meshes" are and how they are different from TEGB South that I am at this moment downloading. Can you point me in the direction of an idiots guide?
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