Distant 3D object rendering [games]

Question

What is the basic premise behind technology such as is found in Oblivion (and other games, I\'m sure; haven\'t played enough to know), wherein objects from afar are vaguely show

Answer 1

One way to handle terrain is to have multi-resolution tiles. Much like how Virtual Earth and Google Maps do it, they divide the world into tiles in a recursive fashion. So, there are 4 tiles at level 0, 16 at level 1, etc... Then, using some LoD algorithm to determine the zoom/scale, you would load the appropriate terrain tiles for the given area.