thanks for the valuable hints and recommendations. Indeed, it's a tricky thing - and there are lot of ways, a lot of surprises too in sppeding up the engine.

Need makes inventive - as the German saying goes -, and so I came up with a mixture of map entities, models - and their perpetual change. One thing which struck me was the fact that the engine renders models faster than blocks of complicated geometry.

Here are a few screenshots of a suburban place. It's still under heavy development, just a snapshot of the ongoing development (and corresponds very well to the ugly, post-socialist environment).