alpilotx

Simply put yes ... otherwise there wouldn't have been much reason to create UHD Mesh Scenery 😉

There are before-and-after Screenshots which should give you a relatively good understanding about what HD Mesh Scenery v4 can give you (also how it improves forests): https://photos.app.goo.gl/0h8i3iBme4NVA53E3

Yes, thats a long known bug to Laminar/Ben Supnik. Effectively the forest polygons are "sliced up" to make them easier to handle by the scenery engine. But there is some slight offset along the polygon borders when they get filled in by trees. So, in the end you see the "border" of those forest chunks ... There is not much that can be done about this (other then Ben fixing the issue at some point ... but he - obviously - didn't have time to do so for a few years). (and yes, I am still lurking around here at some times .... which doesn't means that I changed my mind ... just old "habits" 😉 )

And now ... think about it ... where does that magical FPS come from ? My simple magic: there is no such thing as free beer .... You always have to pay one way or another. Even with our fastest GPUs you still have to decide between eye candy or FPS ... (to some degree ... and depending on your poreferences).

Absolutely not surprising ... and explicitly warned about in the "warnings" section on the website. UHD Mesh Scenery is simply the "highest end" when it comes to landclass based scenery and it definitely pushes the limits of what current (beginning of 2018) hardware can handle.

NOooooo ... you still do not have UHD Mesh Scenery v4 loaded (at least not in these screenshots) ... Sorry, but those are definitely photoscenery screenshots (likely Ortho4XP ... or what other stuff you use). Thats really cleraly visible. And UHD mesh is definitely not orthoimagery based .... So, why don't you simply check in the Log.txt (as suggested) to see what is really happening? And yes, maybe it even loads a few UHD mesh tiles (remember, XP11 always loads 4x3=12 tiles around your location) but in the place where you are flying (sometimes it can be 1-2 tiles) its definitely an orthoimagery you are looking at. Believe me !

No, definitely no plans at the moment for any expansions of UHD Mesh Scener yv4.

For all of those "happily" running it on a machine with 16 GB RAM, please check, if you REALLY have it loaded (or only imagine it - happened very often in the past)! Refer to this simple test: http://www.alpilotx.net/downloads/x-plane-11-uhd-mesh-scenery-v4/#How_to_know_if_the_installation_was_correct

Absolutely (and definitely doable) .... but do not underestimate the work involved in creating those textures. They are not just "plain simple" textures, but have complex alpha information included in them for more natural blending (depending on which textures mix at which position), and are also included in delicately tuned TER files (which describe how to use the textures with which shaders, in which combinations). To make this all work nicely (and not just quick and dirty) quite a lot of artistic work is needed (and I mean a lot of time ... and lots of experimenting). If it wouldn't so "complex" a lot more such texture replacements / additions would have popped up already (still, the most of them come from TerraMax / UrbanMaxx etc.). Just to pot it in perspective ... I would estimate the task of re-creating all current textures at 1 year for one talented person (with access to good raw texture resources, having good tools, and a quick understanding of how things work). A larger team could do it maybe a tad faster ... but not much , as the analysis and understanding of the current system (and all the experimenting) would alone eat up quite a few months. When we did the current set of ground textures - which already happened with XP10 - then creating the whole new scenery system (with all the data processing, rule tuning, experimenting) for me (1 person) and to create the textures and fine tune all the TER files (plus bringing in new ideas, experimenting open end, trying new shader tricks) for the texture artist guy (1 other person) took approximately 2 1/2 years .... (but neither were wee doing it full time).

Did you read my first comment ? There was that other one: HD Mesh Scenery v4 .... quite broad coverage, with high res mesh (with high res landclass representation) + forests + autogen + road network : http://www.alpilotx.net/downloads/x-plane-11-hd-mesh-scenery-v4/ This is for you, as my website says: HD mesh Scenery v4 also has a much larger coverage (of course at the cost of a little less eye candy ... but it should suffice in most places).

... You are writing a lot about your hardware, which is quite powerful ... but that single line about your RAM might be the show stopper ... as this is 16 GByte only. And there is a clear sentence on my website, which say "32 GBytes of RAM are highly recommended" ... Even though, you might be lucky with 16 GB, and maybe can run some areas ... but others might end up in OOMs.

Well, "to make your life harder" (of course not), I didn't release UHD Mesh Scenery v4 in the exact same tiling schema as HD Mesh (10x10 degree tiles) .... Which you might already have noticed. One of the reasons is, that UHD Mesh Scenery v4 is more oriented along where it made to sense to have it (and where I had good data). So, for this reason you can't completely avoid to have overlapping data anyways ...

Do not NEED, but you can .... As MarioDonnick also pointed out. And usually - contrary to his wording - I (and most users) have them both installed at the same time (at least users whose computer is powerful enough - especially enough RAM), just having UHD Mesh Scenery v4 positioned above HD Mesh Scenery v4 in the scenery_packs.ini (this way automatically get UHD where its available and fall back to HD where not). Of course, in overlapping areas you have some redundancy (and "waste" of disk space) .... but compared with Ortho4XP scenery (where every tile - especially with higher res orthoimagery - takes up a really big chunk of disk space) its not such a big issue (especially if you have enough HDD / SD space).

Hmm, not exactly .... As we also have: HD Mesh Scenery v4 .... quite broad coverage, with high res mesh (with high res landclass representation) + forests + autogen + road network : http://www.alpilotx.net/downloads/x-plane-11-hd-mesh-scenery-v4/ UHD Mesh Scenery v4 (just released and written about in a thread next to this one) ... more limited coverage, for extreme res mesh (with very high res landclass representation) + forests + autogen + road network : http://www.alpilotx.net/downloads/x-plane-11-uhd-mesh-scenery-v4/

No worries (I know, this freaks users sometimes ... but its really a non issue): the tile names in X-Plane are not some gibberish random numbers. the name of every DSF file is an exact geographic reference to where it belongs .... it tells the coordinates of the lower left corner of each 1x1 degree DSF tile. so, for example -39+173 is a DSF which covers an area from 39S to 38S and 173E to 174E (yes, negative values mean southern latitudes or western longitudes). Now, if you check a map, you will see, that this (example) area is out in the ocean / open water ... no land mass in it. X-Plane does NOT need to have DSFs for water only tiles. It know to draw all water, if there is no DSF for an area. Thats why its "just" warning .... as X-Plane can't know on its own where to expect land and where not ... so it cautions you, that you might be missing a DSF .... but if its all water anyways (in real life), then you can ignore the warning. And if we are already at it: of course the folders, which contain those DSFs follow the same naming rules (folder name is the lower left coordinate of a given area) ... The only difference is, that folders always refer to a 10x10 degree area (its like an index ... so DSF files can be structured in sub-folders but allow X-Plane to still quickly find them).