Best way to manage huge mmorpg style worlds?

[LordMyth]

I thought that marking as 'static mesh' and applying an octree to it would do very well, but some other guy said this:

Well the terrain would be split into pieces, small pieces, you can have a single terrain mesh that is equal in size to an entire static zone, becuase the average consumers computer doesn't have the ability to load two huge areas like that into memory at once, which is what you would have to do when they are at the seams, so instead you have to split an area into smaller pieces, and go from there. I know for a fact that the ogre memory manager in versions < 1.0 doesnot have the ability to keep the memory correctly allocated while you move around, we ran into that issue on the last project i was working on. It will run fine for a little while, but the number of memory leaks are terrible, so unless they have refined the system alot, we would have to change it to work for us.

They're all a bit strange up there, no really good programmers, so I think this could be nonsense. What you?

[:wumpus:]

You can disable the Ogre memory manager (automatically done in release mode), it's really just a leak checker which can be convient to *find* leaks. I don't see how it causes leaks.

The tiling idea works very well and AFAIK that's what all large-area rpg like games use.

[LordMyth]

So the guy is actually totally wrong about telling not to use octrees?

[:wumpus:]

Well, you would probably use an octree *inside* a tile, but the tiles themselves are just laid out in a simple 2d grid throughout the world.

[LordMyth]

So whe're better off using a paging scenemanager?

[Lucky_Luciano]

So whe're better off using a paging scenemanager?

I currently use the Paging Landscape2 Scenemanager in my current project to render huge terrains and it does a mighty good job.

[:wumpus:]

For the terrain? yeah, certainly...