Well I have come to the admit defeat and just drop the view I have had in my game and just go with the standard top down look but slightly skewed. The user can move up and down to zoom in a bit and rotate 360 degrees, but no more looking out over the vast landscape. I have determined that shadowmapping unless its PSSM just isn't up to par with the quality I want to see in large outdoor areas. PSSM is nice but comes at a performance hit. I can't afford anymore FPS hits as my FPS are borderline where I think they are acceptable so far. My skydome looks ok, but from a realism stand point ugh, just a texture of a sky, not good enough anymore and this would take more of my time that I don't have to find/fix the sky to make it look up to par with what I want. All of these and other points start to push my game back more and more. I just want to finish it and then look at whats out at the time for power and code accordingly.
I have been looking at PBO's lately but not sure what good they would be for a RTS. Anyone have any ideas glad to hear them.
How is everyone rendering 100's of models on the screen these days? Lets say you have 50 different model types but you have two players that can have 250 units each. So 500 units on the screen from 50 different units. Can't I just have one model object for all the instances of that unit and just render it where I want to, by just using a lets call it mesh manager that hold each instance's position and ID number and then loop throught that mesh manager and render that units mesh at the locations... Still seems wasteful, what about instancing how is that different from what can be done now? Instancing draws once and you can place that mesh all over the scene with one call? This I can see saving cycles...
I haven't read much of your journal yet, so if you've already done this, I appologize: You should really profile your code before you start trying to optimize things such as geometry submission. Adding prettier graphics might push the frame-rate over the edge, but that does not necissarily mean that graphics are your bottle-neck. I would make an attempt to find out what is really causing your game to run slowly. You may find a few easy fixes and surprise yourself; maybe you'll be able to put nicer shadows in after all.