How abouts would you go if you wanted to create a huge world with cities and all whilst having it really detailed. Is it even possible. Like in GTA 3, but with more detail.
Is there anyway to make the game load the parts of the world as you play.
Plz Help

More theory than anything:

City sized levels

Yea, I wonder also. I've read in the user's manual to consider LOD (level of detail) So what I gathered was you have 4 levels of detail and the most detailed level is where your'e currently and then you have the levels switch according to where the player or camera moves to. Also I think you only skin the visible sides of the blocks in your level and turn off shading for anything that's not visible , like the back sides of blocks etc. Also I haven't tried it yet but you can do things like level change in the middle of the game, for example, if a guy walks into a building with a lot of stuff in it, you can treat that like it's own level etc. Oh well, I'm still strugling with how to get my terrain to show up textured in the edit mode so that I can place buildings etc. So I've got a ways to go. Also I say read the manual on the LOD I mentioned because I could be wrong , I'm just intermediate. Hope that helps any. -Brut

I should also say.

You cant stop the bsp process splitting large blocks into many portals but you can help reduce the number of portals considerably also by making sure that blocks never actually overlap, which creates further splitting and many more portals. This can be painstaking by necessary if you want huge levels.

Do this by making sure all walls just touch each other using snap to grid or if possible never actually touch each other at all in places where you cant see the join, areas of darkness and so on. If under magnification (zoom) you just get them touching or aligning very closly but not touching and use high prec when you build your level the bsp processe will close the gap in many istances.

Unless you have bright lights behind minute cracks - in normal gameplay the player wont notice any that do remain - but you will save creating many extra portals this way.

Then you must ensure that you level is surrounded by a single hollow box (no gaps)or you will get uneccessary leak artifacts showing up even if the engine may not mind running the level.

It's do-able but build times would be a pain. Am I the only one who it seems to have been that with the 6.11 that build times are much longer? Maybe its jsut me....

Build times will be a touch slower I am guessing because of the better lighting and new collison detection. Haven't really ran any long builds to compare the two, but it would make sense.

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....

well, first, you gotta know that games like gta 3(or vice city) are made as loose modals. Every part of the "city" is a modal. As in, every building and stuff. For this to work in 3d gamestudio you could make models (of buildings) or map entities. And in one map just glue 'm all togetter, without using blocks. Just the models. You will see that the build time will be around 1 or 2 secs. No matter how big your map is. And it will work. Even on low-end pc's. cuz modals are loaded on sight and aren't hanging around in the video memory when they are out of sight for the player. (blocks and prefabs do that)

Worked for me

Let me just ask a question or two to try to get my mind straight on all this. It seems to me to be an important issue. Does everyone agree with robindegen that using models for buildings will compile faster than blocks? I understand that models don't work as well for collision detection, right?
But what about the fps when the game is running? What is the trade-off there? Do models slow down gameplay? Would it make any sense to make the first floor of a building out of blocks, then drop the rest of the skyscraper on top as a model? The first floor would have good collision detection, and the model would just be there for looks? Does it make sense to use models for buildings if you can't get up next to them?
I have built some fairly large levels out of blocks, and am hitting some FPS and build-time issues, and have not much in the way of NPC's added. So some discussion of this would be helpful.