From what i've seen of A6 so far it appears on the outset to be a big step backwards with little obvious improvements...

However now that we are playing with it more it becomes clear that nothing is further from the truth. The 32bit images really improve the smoothness of shadows, sprites and other such imagery. The editing tools are greatly improved and now have more incommon with other code tools like borlands C++.

We have experienced some strange Nexus restrictions/requirments and the overall speed of the engine seems to be the same at best, but we are yet to explore this so i can not comment......

BTW: Regarding large city scapes or gameplay areas like GT:III VC I can say this:

Play GT and watch to see how they do it. In my opinion they simply combine all the trickery available in GameStudio in an almost perfect way. They combine simple models (like palm trees) with sprites (like the palm leaves) to reduce strain on the processor, the terrain is constructed in smaller 'tiles' to help clipping, and they use 4 levels of detail...

The buildings themselves are a combination of textured simple map blocks and models which you can not enter as they are just blocks.

Finally the people that populate GT and their cars are spawned and removed as you drive around. You will have noticed that NPC entities that leave the immediate vacinity are gone for good as they have been removed.

Finally to help your render time, construct your buildings as map-entities as
this will greatly reduce your compile time.

Hope that helps....