possible way to reduce overhead withed tiled contiguous maps

[dialNforNinja]

I'm still at the design doc stage for my project, not yet even thinking seriously about psuedocode, but thought I'd float this idea to see if anyone spots obvious holes in it.

Basically, maps for a continuous open world are generally laid out like square bathroom tiles, and the surrounding one or two rings around where the player is also loaded to avoid popup crossing a map border. My concept is maps bassd a power of two grid, offset every other row for a pseudo hexagonal layout. This drops a single layer

[dialNforNinja]

ring to 7 total cells rather than 9, or with 2 rings around the current cell, 19 vs. 25 in a square array. Visibility culling helps without messing with such things, but still has to be calculated, an small map cells load faster, helping avoid breaks in gameplay.

Sorry about the double post, I'm on a crappy mobile right now and that's the length of the text entry box.

What do you think, sirs?

[Mel]

You could just have the visible cells, so instead of 9 or 7 you have just 4 cells, your current one, and 3 more at most, with a fov less than 90º, which is the most expected scenario. The layout really doesn't matter, but i think a square approach is simpler than an hexagonal approach. and they benefit better of the advantages of an octree given that the shapes are more alike. my 2 cents (:

[dialNforNinja]

Ah, well, I'm doing a flight sim/mecha game. It's entirely possible that that 90º field of view will be looking straight down from a great height, and even if most details are LOD-managed out the basic terrain and large structures need to be there. I actually plan to have vertically stacked maps, connecting multiple lower altitude cells to a single higher altitude one with a low detail or skybox texture 'ground,' though the exact altitudes and number of layers involved are still uncertain.