Huge open land-scapes and real-time rendering. Thougts?

Hello World
This is more general wonderings than monogame-SPECIFIC questions…
As I know nobody with any computer awereness, I would appreciate any responses…

When doing 3d games, the default approach to handling large architecture / levels would seem to be compartmentalization of some sort;
Updating and drawing whatever hall or room corresponds to the players location on the map-grid…
Resulting in a limited pool of active objects to manage, rather than the whole level at once etc…

But what happens in a world where the player has enormous freedom to roam in all directions, like in a flight sim?
(I am working on a sand-box flight sim btw…)

Does anyone have any thoughts on the subject of sub-deviding a large open world?

I have been thinking of something like mip-maps; having various poly-count terrain models for various altitudes, and then simply drawing everything within sight-radius…

This wuold seem to result in
low altitude = fewer models = more detail
and
high altitude = more models = less detail

Though I dont love the idea of detail levels popping into existance before my eyes…

And how do you feel about “fog” hiding the draw-distance horizon ? ? I think it looks cool, but I’m affraid it will get old sooner or later…

Here is an interesting read on ‘geomorphing’

That is exactly how it is done. The trick is making sure the high detail meshes and textures are loaded in time before you reach the area you are moving towards. I remember playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and driving so fast for an extended run that the preloader couldn’t keep up and I would end up in a low detail mesh area for a few seconds until the high detail mesh popped into view. The other trick is knowing which high detail meshes to discard to make room for new high detail meshes coming into memory. Usually this would be done on a LRU (Least Recently Used) basis, or in this case it is more like Least Recently Seen.

Great answers!

This was exactly the kind of stuff I was fishing for! Better even.

Its great to have some beacons to sail by, thanks a lot!