I was working on a game recently that required a really large playing are (helicopter type thing), and I noticed that the landscape keeps disappearing when it gets too far away. Now, the logical solution would be to scale everything down, but when you do that, the GE tends to make more errors in the physics. Is there any way to stop things from disappearing when they go to far away?
rightclick on the camera…
you can tweak the view distance there…
Dont do to much, or you will be rendering too many things at one time…
please look up the term “Culling fog”, you can do a nice workaround in blender by doing this…
jjust make the end of the camera a few units into the end of the fog…
dunno… the Concept of LOD might help you out too, but I suggest doing/faking a Culling fog or a fade system first.
Extending the camera clip end well past the end of the fog is pointless (unless you use some function to change distance). You’ll just be rendering more stuff you’re not seeing.
For the landscape yes, just increase the clip end.
But for really big areas. you can try to increase the grid spacing, in the View Properties of the 3D Window. Then the maximum distance will also be increase (will be multiplied). So, try to change from 1.0 to 2.0 in Grid Spacing, then the maximum will be 10000 (instead of the default 5000). Hope this helps 
well…
if things just appear, will really give the landscape a nice “programmer art” feel to it.
Just joking 
you must like things just going BOING! and appearing.
it is much more realistic if things fade in from the fog.
Trees, houses and mountains dont just “Appear out of nowhere” . when you are driveling along in the countryside .
I can see it now… the player walks along and all the sudden “POW!” a house just appears…
wow! the professionalism of it all
man, I could really use a cold root beer… <keeps walking> POOOOW! Hey look, a root beer appeared at my foot! sw00t!
In other words p00f, IIIIIIII Like it! j/k (although I would like root beer to appear at my feet on command…)
Also, it makes sense to split the terrain mesh to separate objects so that the engine doesn’t need to render one huge mesh all the time.
lmao with andy
BTW here in hawaii, it is illegal to put your root in another mans beer
… uh… umm… er… yeah…
You have implanted a very bad image in my mind centering about root beer… ewwwww!
Luckily, I don’t have to worry about that, I get my root beer in nice cans, with the sharp little opening 
Lol
Could you please explain this further?
Thanks
I can’t find the option to set the view distance of the camera…
hi LemonMan
right click on your camera and press F4
I think Clipping and Mist are the only ones you can tweak for the game engine
if you want to tweak the mist setting they are under world propertys F8
both the camera and the world must have mist ticked to work
I mean isn’t it better to render only couple of 1000 polygon meshes at a time instead of one 100 000 polygon mesh? You can still have 100 of those 1000 polygon meshes, but only few of them are visible at any time. GE uses culling to remove (or decides not to draw) those meshes which are outside of camera range (clipping). Keep in mind that every object increases the physics overhead so it is important to find a balance between graphics and physics overhead.
Objects popping in instead of fading in is a problem even in commercial games. And about the 1,000 mesh idea, you can give it a few more polygons if you have a good card. I have a GeForce 7300 LE with 1.5 gigs of RAM and the GE with physics just zips along.
Oooooh!
I found the Distance setting for the camera…
That really helps.
Thanks!