That is a really good question, I've been doing some considerable testing and experimenting with pipelines for building the game world.

One variation that I have already explored is to make the game world up from same sized sections, maybe 32m cubed parts that would allow relativly high definition visually as textures would be less tiled and highly unique; of course lots of nice scope for shaders such as normal mapping and other such trickery.

Most importantly, and this really supports the meta game model we're planning for, most important of all is that this would allow dynamic 'dungeon' creation.

Using studio Max as our tool base it is relativly easy to establish a template that all of these parts are modeled from and with some cunning script work parts can then be identified and themed allowing some very nice generated maps and even very dynamic scenarios.

I think that the tiled dungeon approach has a lot of potential but subsequently it also means that there are a lot more polygons in the view and performance is a little harder to manage...

I am also looking at ways to use this system in a more organic way, allowing nice environments, alien planets and so on, to be populated with the core game area in parts... some raised sci-fi gangways where the game takes place while the environment around is less 'underground'

I will drop some of these elements into the game world in the next video, so hopefully more discussion about this can be made..

This afternoon however I really want to get the core Ai awareness system working better. I've got a couple of new states to get finished: