Quote:Original post by Beather
Does this mean that WoW uses multithreading to load the maps in the background?

I don't know WoW (i know it, but never played it), but i know it must use multithreading for loading in the background, otherwise the main thread would stall when there is a huge chunk to load.

Quote:Original post by Beather
What happens when you change from chunk?
What's the best way for me to visualize these chunks?

??? I don't know what you mean.

Quote:Original post by Beather
Do you know of an example that use these chunks to generate seamless terrain?

There was a nice article about Dungeon Siege's seamless terrain (from 2002) describing it in detail. I don't find it anymore, but Google gave me links to the slides at least.
The Continuous World of Dungeon Siege - Powerpoint slides

Quote:Original post by Beather
...I guess there should always be another thread running to load all adjacent maps.
This would mean there are 9 height maps loaded at all times.
9 height maps means 9 meshes in memory. Am I correct? This seems a lot of memory to me. Especially because WoW's zones are very big and the game runs very smooth.

At first, yes, you have to load the adjacent nodes/maps/chunks/whatever. Hold them in memory and unload them, when you get to far away from the particular chunks.
Now to the memory size. Don't overestimate the needed size per chunk data. If its still to big, make your map chunks smaller! For a huge terrain, you just have the terrain mesh in memory (thousands of vertices still needs less memory than some big textures), but not the texture on a particular map patch far far away. You won't see it on your screen, so you don't need it in memory! You have to do the right partitioning of your data (textures eat up most of available memory)!

Quote:Original post by Beather
My other question: ...
I would say, to measure one's coordinates, that you have four members;
...
The other thread reads this mapID and loads all adjacent maps in silence. Is this correct?

Sounds okay. But take notice of the following:
If you move from one mapID to another, you load the 3 new adjacent map chunks, but wait with unloading of the old 3 chunks behind you. The usual approach is that the circle around you, where to start loading new map chunks is smaller than the one which determines when to unload a map chunk. That is because of the fact, when you are standing close to a mapID border and moving back and forward (hence passing over the border again and again), you would continually load and unload the same map chunks.