TotalMexico FAQ

Do I need to pay every year for TotalMexico?

NoTotalMexico is a one time only fee and your membership will be active for the life of the product.   You will have access to every single update always.

What is the foot print of TotalMexico?

The complete country of Mexico is about 650 Gigs.

If you are short in storage you can just download the area or areas of your interest.  You can erase them from your HDD and download another area or areas.  You can erase and download as many times as you want.

Where do I download the tiles?

TotalMexico is designed to live in a folder of its own anywhere you like.  It could be in the same HDD that Xplane is installed or in a different one, even an external HDD.  The only thing you need to be aware if you install it in an external HDD is that if you are plugging and unplugging the external HDD you need to make sure it keeps the same assigned drive letter as the shortcut that TotalMexico creates inside your Custom Scenery folder is related to that drive letter.

We recommend creating a folder named TotalMexico and select this as your Storage Folder inside the TotalMexico app.

Do I need to edit the scenery_packs.ini file after the tiles are installed?

No.  TotalMexico is designed to take care of adding the shortcuts inside the scenery_packs.ini file for you.

TotalMexico downloads, extracts and modifies the scenery_packs.ini file automatically.

Is TotalMexico compatible with other third party add-ons?

TotalMexico is 100% compatible with other third party add-ons such as airport sceneries, library objects (trees, houses, roads, etc.), and other autogen overlays.

The only conflict that may appear is if you have other terrain/texture orthos for the same area as Xplane will show both terrains causing terrain and texture artifacts.

You should deactivate any other orthos for the area of Mexico, incluiding those that might come with some airport sceneries that cover the whole tile.   If the scenery comes with some terrain mesh patches to address airport bridges or some other airport area in particular it is fine, and you should leave those mesh patches as they are part of the local scenery and its design.

You might find that some airports come with satellite imagery that will make look your terrain blurry or low resolution.  The zoom level of the satellite imagery inside the airport area of TotalMexico is zoom level 19, with a special treatment based on decals to add sharpness and definition.

If the textures underneath your airport are looking blurred,  you might want to open the airport in WED and remove those polygons to allow TotalMexico zoom level 19 imagery to show through.

What is the impact of TotalMexico in my fps?

TotalMexico has been optimized and does not affect your fps.   Quite the contrary, you will see an increase in your fps for most of the areas.

The increased fps is because Xplane with the default terrain is "drawing" the land each time depending on the land class.  So Xplane needs to see which kind of texture needs to be applied on the terrain each time.

With an ortho tile, Xplane is not performing these steps.  It just uploads the textures in the VRAM without looking after which land class needs to be displayed.

Note on the Mexico City area.  Tile +19-100

Mexico City is a very heavy area due to the amount of autogen buildings rather than the size of the tile.  If you see a decrease in your fps in the Mexico City area, we recommend to lower your settings for the amount of scenery items being displayed.

Some areas and big cities show a very little amount of buildings, is this by design?

TotalMexico was designed to provide High Resoultion terrain mesh (30m resolution per arc sec) and the latest available satellite imagery without clouds and color patches.

The overlays (buildings, road networks, power lines, etc.), are driven by the current actual data of OSM (Open Street Map), which unfortunately does not depend on us.  It depends on the current available data to display the amount of autogen scenery.  For our current team to fill these gaps would be a massive task due to the extension of the country.  However, this is something that we have our eyes on for a future release as another product.

Meanwhile, there is a free overlay for the Americas provided by simHeaven:  x-America.  This overlay will add more houses and buildings to TotalMexico.   Our only recommendation is to disable the forests as TotalMexico does have the latest data available from USGS and INEGI to provide forests coverage and in our tests with x-America, the forests provided by their overlay will show less amount, incomplete or will place trees where they are not supposed to be.

It takes too much time to download and install...

The download time depends on the speed of your internet connection.

Downloading and installing the complete package will take around 30 hours to download on a 50mb/sec connection and 5 hours in a 300mb/sec connection.   But you don't need to babysit.  Just select your tiles, click on the Install Tiles button and let TotalMexico do the job.

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