you can repeat meshes with arbitrary poly levels and use occluder objects to oclude vast amounts of geometry. I've worked on games with 100's of thousands of polys no problem using these techniques on modern consoles.
Arbitrary meshes do become a problem if you insist on lightmapping everything. Depending on the game your making and the hardware, you might try streaming off of the HD or DVD.
Modern engines seem to be going for hybrid systems which are possible with newer shader 3d hardware and more advanced lighting techniques.
Even in blitz you can create pretty big levels by using instanced geometry in levels created in Max. In the original FMC we had 80 duplicate towers placed around the level using a fraction of the hard storage space, and memory required. All it takes is some time spent on working out an effivcient art path.
Alex's B3D pipeline is a pretty good example which unfortunately is let down a little by blitz3d. Hoping to overcome these in our b3d loader for torque.
It supports instanced geometry, Opcode which were using for concave collisions supports instanced geometry too. Max Xref is supported to some extent in the b3d pipeline which will allow streaming models and scenes off the hard drive on a properly threaded engine. So you can easily have it stream the nearest visible rooms in an interior without loading a level in memory.
Should also be able to use the occluder obscurers, that cull out objects hidden by your obscurer objects. The console game I worked on used a similar system, but was more flexible as it also had negative occluders that opened up windows in culled areas.
more and more people are heading in this direction these days, rather than BSP convex hulls and CSG editors. Once everyone has modern GPU's a lot of the old ways of doing things will most likely disappear.
Arbitrary meshes do become a problem if you insist on lightmapping everything. Depending on the game your making and the hardware, you might try streaming off of the HD or DVD.
Modern engines seem to be going for hybrid systems which are possible with newer shader 3d hardware and more advanced lighting techniques.
Even in blitz you can create pretty big levels by using instanced geometry in levels created in Max. In the original FMC we had 80 duplicate towers placed around the level using a fraction of the hard storage space, and memory required. All it takes is some time spent on working out an effivcient art path.
Alex's B3D pipeline is a pretty good example which unfortunately is let down a little by blitz3d. Hoping to overcome these in our b3d loader for torque.
It supports instanced geometry, Opcode which were using for concave collisions supports instanced geometry too. Max Xref is supported to some extent in the b3d pipeline which will allow streaming models and scenes off the hard drive on a properly threaded engine. So you can easily have it stream the nearest visible rooms in an interior without loading a level in memory.
Should also be able to use the occluder obscurers, that cull out objects hidden by your obscurer objects. The console game I worked on used a similar system, but was more flexible as it also had negative occluders that opened up windows in culled areas.
more and more people are heading in this direction these days, rather than BSP convex hulls and CSG editors. Once everyone has modern GPU's a lot of the old ways of doing things will most likely disappear.