…is currently on €10 sale at Simmarket.
Its advertised as a big improvement: 10m DEM for the high peaks of Nepal and Bhutan.
Experience anyone?
After the ORBX Himalaya fiasco (no real improvement, Lukla inop) I’m reluctant to have another mesh clogging my HD.
A quick comparison is not encouraging (position is Kangtega Peak east of Namche Bazaar):
Taburet Mesh screenshot on Simmarket:
Vanilla Sim:
looks pretty much the same, doesn’t it.
Google is still the best in town, wonder what raw-data they can use and what is available on the civilian market for a much needed future MSFS-WU:
T&R
RF
What Orbx fiasco? My mesh works perfectly
I have no issues (apart from the size!) with the Orbx Himalaya mesh either.
It’s a great addition, and covers a huge area more or less very well.
There’s been two 10M Himalayan DEM’s for the sim doing the rounds for a while now. I’ve used both. I think Orbx one is of a wider area.
The 10M DEM is a definite improvement over the stock sim one but a higher resolution DEM is only half the story when it comes to good looking scenery. The other half is nice high resolution photo imagery to go with it. Sadly with the Himalayas the imagery coming off Bing is ok at best but most of it is fairly low resolution.
It would be nice to get the area looking as good as the Swiss alps but I’m not sure high resolution LIDAR scanning at that altitude is even possible? Maybe it is. Microsoft would need to invest in it.
… bought the ORBX mesh early and found (as others), that Lukla was in a “trench” :
ORBX Himalaya and Central Asia Mesh Broken - General Discussion & Interests / Scenery & Airports - Microsoft Flight Simulator Forums
Guess they did an upgrade, but I deleted it as the improvement was marginal:
Orbx Himalaya & Central Asia Mesh for MSFS - First Look & Review - Microsoft Flight Simulator / Content Creators - Microsoft Flight Simulator Forums
Talking about Bing-imagery:
large parts of the extreme eastern (India, China) and western (Pakistan, Afghanistan) Himalayas look like 2006-FSX in the sim - despite Bing-maps being quite adequate. So it can’t be cloud-cover - and the tile distribution seems random.
A mystery.
Interesting: DEM can be obtained by other means than LIDAR/SRTM/ASTER-scans:
Cold War Spy Photos Show How Fast Himalayan Glaciers Are Melting | WIRED
Would be a great sim mission to catch those orbital canisters!
To be fair to Orbx I thought their Himalaya mesh was a big improvement over default and came with minimal fps downsides too.
Just my opinion.
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