Is it possible in 3dgs to make huge outdoor levels like in the game Black & White?

Can the engine handle:
- levels as large as in the game
- in combo with for example forests
- also with that many characters walking around

I have this question because I'm working on a strategy/sim which I like to set in a B&W kind of environment. As seen in the techdemo you can reach a grafically somewhat same admosphere. So all the graphical options of B&W are possible to get. It's a lot of work but still.
The only doubt I've got is the capacity of the A5 engine for huge levels with loads of entities.

Not the gfx were amazing in B&W but the creature KI was. I guess (= no I am sure) you could achieve the islands, the water and the flora. ALso the special-fx are no problem.
I´m not quite sure about the little village-people( ). As I know they use a special technic to make so many little people at the same time.

Nevertheless it would be a great idea to make such a game. I am looking forward to see more of it

I don't have doubts about the gfx capacity of A5, it's more than sufficient for what I want. The question lies more in two other areas: Can such huge levels be made while still having a high enough framerate and the same goes for the large amount of models needed (loads of trees, buildings and people). So it's more a framerate question than a gfx one.

Black & White made intensive use of Level-Of-Detail. Currently 3D GameStudio supports 4 levels of detail for models only (Extra Edition and above). Also, the rendering algorithm is optimized for indoor levels, thus your framerate won´t benefit from it.
I have no doubts that it is possible to create a similar game with good framerate using A5, but it will require a good deal of programming on your part to make it run fast enough.

Thanks Marco, that's what I needed to know for now. Well it seems I've got some work ahead of me and a lot to learn. But what's a life worth if there aren't any real challenges.

Marco, I assume that you are with Conitec, and that your comment is authoritative. This is pretty important for planning puropses, so let me make sure that I understand. You said that LOD is optimized for internal situations and that it won't increase the framerate on outdoor scenes. Is this right? Because if it is, then we should drop LOD entirely for outdoor scenes. LOD would just take up a lot of additional file space, and would not help the game play at all.
Do I understand this correctly, or am I missing something?

LOD is needed more then ever for outdoor worlds waay more then indoors. Any kind of LOD is better then none for outdoors. You can see more objects & far away so they need to be simplified to keep the framerate up allowing for more objects etc. Polycount & surface subdavision drop framerate but hardly effect filesize , skin/texture size hardly impact the frame rate but almost determin filesize. So for map entities with lots of LOD for sure, models, HMPs LOD with small skin sizes, and I think sprites can be left alone. Marco if you would please elaborate.

I was referring to the portal / visibility calculations; these are optimized for indoor scenarios. LOD and clip_range work well for indoors and outdoors, but are more important in the later.

I'm surprised Skillator didn't mention his own experiments into tiling terrains in 3D Gamestudio. This approach is necessary for large outdoor levels. As already mentioned, use of LOD is absolutely crucial for outdoor levels. However, 3D Gamestudio only has built in LOD for mdl models; thus, to have LOD on the terrain itself you'ld need to write code yourself to do that. And Skillator has done some interesting experiments into using small terrain tiles, tiling away into the distance. This approach to creating terrain would allow you to easily swap in less detailed versions of terrain tiles for distant tiles.

Willi Leopold's Malika uses massive outdoor levels - it is quite demanding on your system (the frame rates are quite low on old systems such as my P3 600, but then Black and White wasn't much less demanding), but it is very impressive and really shows that A5 is capable of nice looking and large outdoor areas (I am lucky enough to have tested it). And, considering that it will take you a while to complete your game - and thus by the time you finish, average specs will have gone up (a P3 600 such as mine is really ancient even now) - then so long as you are careful about your level building (see Willi's tutorial in User Contributions), a Black and White-style game built with A5 should be perfectly possible. (Not to mention the fact that JCL has mentioned, in passing, that A6 will have a faster kernel.)
Cheers,
Keith