Quote Originally Posted by darkchrono View Post
And it gets mind boggling when you think that they would have to create a picture from every single possible angle from every single possible distance on every single spot on the map.
No, they create a world. It consists of one or two things: Primarily, a gigantic wireframe landscape that is covered with a picture of the terrain. Secondly a backdrop or sky, which is a simple bitmap placed behind the primary world (which is why there is infinite sky anytime you fall through a world). When you're in the game, a portion of the wireframe world and its corresponding texture (programmer talk for the picture that covers the wireframe, or mesh, as we call it), and that portion of the world is rendered on your computer. The developers do not create views from each angle and each position on the map: Doing so for a 3-D game would be nearly impossible. They create the outline of the world, and your computer uses that outline to calculate what the view should look like from your current position. Primarily, that is the job of the Graphics card and processor, which is why the game slows down if those pieces of equipment isn't up to spec: The rest of your system is having to talk over the job of your graphics unit and is doing too much work as a result.