I agree. There must be a scene management. Otherwise they could not run this big terrain. But you indeed cannot find information about this in the feature list.

Hi

I think Unity3D users PVS-based occlusion culling and Streaming of Assets and Terrains.

The thing I like about Unity3D is it's easy of use for things like adding lightmaps to models from most 3D Apps.

SEE following http://www.geartechgames.com/GearTech_Games/Unity_Tutorials/Unity_Tutorials.html

The above is modo to Unity3D - how easy is that..

Maybe we should ask them about their scene management.

Their asset management is absolutely hammer!
You just drag and drop, and it works immediately.
You can even exchange assets between windows and mac with
no problems.

The more I see from Unity the more I get to like it. I've bought the commercial version of 3DGS some time ago and I'm not so shure now if that was the right way to go for me.

Don't get me wrong, I like this engine and I learned alot especialy because it is much more basic programming and having to deal with different tools and filetypes gives you a good insight. But having a realtime editor for me is something that feels so natural, I'm shure it speeds up processes a lot. Having to build a map, compile the code and then see that you've done something completely the wrong way around can be very frustrating.

And second, I was blown away by the lightdemo that runs within the browser. I would like to have that, beeing able to show progress to others like that is fantastic. I think it adds a lot of falue to the whole package, and the MAC and Iphone support, too.

All in all, the very things that I would like 3DGS to have, but who knows, maybe Conitec is closing up soon, I would like to stay with this engine and the community.

In the case you did not read the official news about Unity 2.5:

http://unity3d.com/unity/coming-soon/unity-2.5

As far as I know octree or bsp are not anymore so important as they were in the past
At the time the bottle neck was the graphic card
Nowadays it is better to render many tris rather than losing CPU cycles to loop through the octree

BSP (like in quake) really isn't important anymore (actually it is counterproductive) but i think simpler spatial structures like octrees/ABTs/AABB-trees still make sense for rendering. with them you can do hierarchical frustum culling for example and front to back drawing which is nice for the hierarchical z-buffer of modern gpus.

Yes ok but in the classic octrees management system your CPU must create on the fly and go through the hierarchy
If so ,you must pay an high cost in terms of CPU cycles while even a low level modern graphic card can easly render milion tris per second
Unless for octree you mean a simple precompiled " zone " management system
This is at least what I read

This is true for simple shaded objects. But if you use expensive shaders and many dynamic lights then it is the other way around. It is better to create many smaller objects instead of one big and to let the engine do a good culling to calculate only the needed lighting, shadows and shaders.

Polygons do not bring a modern GPU down, but fragment programs (shaders) do and modern games use them very intense. So a good scene and light management is still needed, maybe even more than before.

And because of that optimized engines like C4 will be able to run more detailed and better illuminated/shaded geometry than other ones, especially indoor. There you can use zones and portals to render only what you see on screen. And there is still some visibility culling and intelligent culling of shadows even through portals. This is not trivial.

I miss something like that in the feature list of Unity. So it might be a good alternative for casual games but not for beauty indoor games with bigger levels. Though they proved that they can render outdoor very good with LOD and streaming of terrain chunks.

Interesting but why should zone and portals be more efficient than octrees ?
Also with octrees (or ABT ) you can render only what you see in the screen
However modern engines seem not to use it anymore