Scenery vs. terrain

I'm not 100% clear on the subtle differences, but the main one is that mesh will re-shape your land (i.e., can alter a mountain that should have a sharp cliff but is painted as a rolling hill in FS), and terrain alters what's on it / what kind of texture gets placed where. I have Ultimate Terrain, and it doesn't actually change the hills or valleys, but it "re-zones" what's already there. It places roads where they should be, parks where they should be, and lakes and rivers where they belong. They still use the standard textures, but they are more accurately representative of what's really there.

Accurate mesh, terrain, and texture addons usually work fairly well together at producing incredibly accurate simulations of the real world.

Scenery addons use their own set of buildings, textures, and mapping to accurately place where things should be for very specific zones (i.e. KORD airport, NYC megascenery, etc.). The terrain and mesh are usually provided more for regions than specific zones.

Well, lets put this way, I've been creating this mesh for over a year now and I'd say you couldn't call really call it scenery. This is because it's created using sattelite photographs and by piecing them together. Where as scenery is something that has been designed completely by hand using cameras, programs like GMAX etc...

In other words scenery is composed of hand made buildings,cars etc... that has been created to be 3D in the Flight Simulator. Mesh/Terrain is basically land, continents, the shape of the mountains but you couldn't exactly call it 3D. Could you ?

I'm beginning to get the picture. So if you had, say, Ultimate Terrain or Global Scenery installed, as well as, for example, MegaScenery Southern California, do you notice a distinct change as you fly out of the scenery package region into Ultimate Terrain area?

HL