Firstly some words about myself. I am high functioning autistic (Asperger's Syndrome, I only found out through 4 years ago unexpectedly via diagnosis), and geography and maps has been a passionate obsession of mine since childhood. Concordantly I read for at University and earned a BSc Geography degree, thus I can confidently say that I am an expert geographer on this area. In the computer and internet era, it was natural that this autistic obsession will graduate to Flight Simulation on my self built (& repeatedly rebuilt) PC, and although I have a good career relevant to my degree, in my spare time for the past 6 years I always dwelved with digital elevation models and flight simulator meshes, and had produced my own, but never got round to uploading and selling them. This drive to produce meshes, was also informed by my desire to fly over an accurate and high quality terrain, over the mountain of my childhood and origin, Pelion in Greece, which I have been hiking since 2013 during my summer holidays. Initially as 30M (but instead only 90M) SRTM was not available, I was playing with ASTER 30M V1 (not that good) and then AW3D30 (still the best for 30mresolution but not suitable for built up areas so we need accurate land use data to use it in an area) and then assessed SRTM 30m when it came out, and combining these later 2 by land use criteria. This approach as it was successful and satisfactory, led me to implement this to the rest of Europe, also exploring and incorporating higher resolution data and completing a mesh for the whole of Europe, and from different data, N. America (and another a number of other areas from higher quality data) 3 years ago . So this autistic passion of mine kept expanding and expanding into a desire to fly in the best possible mesh anywhere in the word. And this was only possible if I personally made this mesh! Now with time on my hands since April due to the lockdown, I had to complete this work of producing the best quality mesh everywhere. which had always been bothering me inside whilst not completed.
Now I have just finished developing a global terrain mesh product which is not yet another mesh. It is compatible with FSX &P3D v1-5 & FSW (all sims in that family). This will be at a minimum LOD10, based on NASADEM, rather than SRTM V3 which is the standard for current mesh products. The advantage is that NASADEM is a reprocessing of the original SRTM data to minimise data voids, occurring predominantly in mountainous areas (which in SRTM are filled with much worse quality data), and then these data voids, which in NASADEM are a fraction of what they are in SRTM, are filled with higher quality data, like AW3dD30 or ASTER GDEM V3.
Thus mountainous terrain or high relief areas outside of Europe and N. America, like the Andes or the Himalayas, will be much more accurately represented, compared to meshes based on SRTM (where rendering these areas at HD/38m would effectively be lost). A demo of how this transforms the terrain, can be seen in NASADEMs own YouTube clip here:
Some continents (N.America & Europe) are done at LOD12-11 from different, higher resolution datasets than the global product (N.America on national 10-22.5m datasets, processed at a corresponding LOD quality for sake of fidelity, and Europe from 20-30m actual quality data), and certain regions within these continents (75% of Alps in LOD13, most of remaining Italy at LOD12-13, Spain at LOD13 (or outside, Japan, New Zealand) (some regions, like 75% of Alps and Japan for the 1st time ever) done at even higher details like LOD12-13, of course from data of at least 5-10m quality. These higher definition areas arel be included in the global product, but also sold separately as their own 4 products (N. America, Europe-inc. some overseas islands, Japan, New Zealand) with the buyer having the option of paying the difference and upgrading to global later on. In this approach I endeavour to provide a global product, offering the best visible quality possible mesh for any area, and bridging the gap between a global product of standard definition and high quality local meshes, combining the advantages and offering the best of both worlds, and largely eliminating the need to buy any other mesh products. The customer can safely buy their area of interest, try it out and if they like what they see, they can buy the global product, including all the other high quality areas, by simply paying the difference.
