This has been most enlightening... and, at the risk of stepping all over my, errr two feet, here...

... I would think that dynamically loading separate entity maps as described in a previous thread (treadmill technique) might be the best way to implement an unlimited large scale world.

This would appear to eliminate the long build times, and all other problems associated with large scale world construction...

... and this method would also seem to allow an unlimited world size, ideal for flight and naval sims, or massive online worlds where users can construct their own lil properties and such.

I'm gonna try something like this in a few days... if I get it started reasonably soon, I'll post the results here.

--Mike