Perpetual world loading?

[Riceman]

I'm in the planning stages for my game project and am trying to choose an engine. My choices have been narrowed down to Ogre3D, Irrlicht, and Crystal Space. I'd like to know from you insiders whether Crystal Space meets certain requirements I have. In particular, I need to know if CS fits the bill for this one:

Persistent, Perpetual World - The main game world generally does not have load times when traveling, as the graphics are generated seamlessly. Think MMORPG, though this project is not an MMO.

I'm creating a single-player sandbox RPG that mimics the interface and general feel of an MMORPG, and I'd like to have full worlds that require no obvious loading beyond the initial startup one. Can CS do this easily?

[Xordan]

Persistent, Perpetual World - The main game world generally does not have load times when traveling, as the graphics are generated seamlessly. Think MMORPG, though this project is not an MMO.

I'm creating a single-player sandbox RPG that mimics the interface and general feel of an MMORPG, and I'd like to have full worlds that require no obvious loading beyond the initial startup one. Can CS do this easily?

Yes it can do this pretty easily. Currently there's a threaded loader (In CS 1.9) which can background load for you, but you'd have to provide your own loading logic to feed it the right data at the right time.
There's projects using CS which do this (for the features that they need), so you could look at those (you should be able to easily pull out the code into your own project) if you don't want to write your own logic for when to load.
Or just use those for reference.

One is at:

https://planeshift.svn.sf.net/svnroot/planeshift/trunk/src/common/engine/loader.cpp
https://planeshift.svn.sf.net/svnroot/planeshift/trunk/src/common/engine/loader.h

The PrecacheData method allows you to feed it data about your world (maybe at program startup),  then you call UpdatePosition with your world position and it loads/unloads everything for you by magic.
It's pretty new code and fairly untested so it might be a bit buggy, but it should give you a good idea.

I don't know the details or url offhand for the other approach that Peragro (another project) uses, but it'd be worth looking at that also.