Working on massive MMO cave environment. I'm a little lost... Help?

ZenDavis

I have a duty of making a massive environment for an MMO game. Im blocking out yet. Basically it's a dome which is almost 1.5km wide with 3 big tunnels connected to it which would lead you out of the dome.

The problem:

You are now aware of the dome being so huge. due to it's shape, size and limited time I'm not able to build it with putting one model on anoher. It simply wouldn't end up looking as it is in one piece like right now. (or maybe I'm wrong?) So the problem is it is really massive, it will be widely viewed and if I tile a texture over it so much so I'd have a decent look when I'm close to the dome, it'd look so repititive due to it's large scale, and if I tile it so less so I have a better view, it looks so low res. Same applies wit the tunnels.

I was so happy to approach everything the modular way and generally scale down it all a bit but it's not what my client has wants so I'm driving crazy. But how can I make this tunnels and this dome look good now? I am refered to the tunnels of Dear Esther for the look but well those are a hundred times smaller and you don't have such a wide view of such a massive models.

Is that even possible to make some surfaces like that look so good as a AAA content?

WarrenM

Does the engine you're using support material editing? You could hook up something that, based on distances, fades in a macro map to break up the tiling or larger/smaller versions of the rock material. So, stuff in the distance uses smaller tiling values than stuff up close.

ZenDavis

It unfortunately is Cryengine with that limited material editor. All I can do is to assign the texture maps. Unless I'm misunderstanding the limitations of CE3?