I’ve been so focused on getting the actual gameplay to work that I havent really paid attention to another very important topic - optimization.
The goal is a large, open outdoor environment without any obvious scene-transitions.
Is it possible to in any efficient way have a high-poly environment (~ 30k) loaded into one scene? For instance by dynamically loading and unloading sections of the environment nearby the character, and have either a top-down perspective that only permits a limited perspective, or a fog-curtain if the perspective is first-person?
If so, do you know where I can find more info on this matter as my googling is falling short?
just put all in but make it out of enough distinct parts and set up occlusion culling
that will likely work best
also 30k is not really detailed or high poly if thats the whole scene 
30k on screen is high poly and a matter of headache (guess you are targeting 3GS+ only anyway if you are worried about higher detail related things. on pre 3GS you are potentially over the edge by a factor of 2-3 depending on how the rest looks)
Well, it’s the whole environment, but then you’ve got animated characters as well 
But I think I can definitely refrain from having 30k polygons on the same screen though
I watched the video about occlusion-culling and got the impression that it’s really only effective on an indoor-environment. I’ll have to look into that a bit more to see if I understood it’s function correctly.
Btw, any definite info on wether occlusion-culling will be in the basic iphone license or not?
Its effective whenever you have stuff occluding a reasonable amount of the view, which you normally want to have if you target such a restricted device as the iphone.
even if you pretend to be out in the wild, you can still have hills, valleys, ruins etc that block whatever is behind.
If you can’t then you will need to have a reasonably short view range, desktop alike standard camera settings will commonly only ensure that you don’t need 2 letters in front of the . of the fps counter, especially if you have additional animated characters.
OC on iphone non-pro: It was confirmed that umbra will be a unity 3 pro / iphone pro / xxx pro only feature some weeks ago by HiggyB, yes.
On iphone 1.x though its present on both ie basic and advanced (that naming no longer exists with U3)
I guess Ill have to revert to Unity 1.7 then. Cant say I found anything similarly vital that they added to Unity 3 that you cant do without. Lightmapping is nice, but you can easily get that elsewhere, whereas occlusion culling is only available from within unity (as I understand it, anyway).
Wonder how long it will be possible to ship games with 1.7 though. Any speculations based on previous generation-shifts?
Also, is it possible to revert a project developed in U3 to U1.x automatically, or is it a one-way-street? Was pretty easy to go from U1.x to U3 - just a couple of changes in how they named the input-classes I think.
There was no case when they no longer could be shipped basing on generations etc at all.
the only case when previous versions no longer worked was with 1.5.0 and older due to the change of private api checking at apple.
otherwise there was no case where old versions no longer worked actually.
UT does not have any such handling for Unity and apple couldn’t care less if they aren’t in ToS bitching mood
one way street
you will have to recreate it
Just a shame the specs werent fixed when I placed my pre-purchase order - would have saved me some cash. Not having occlusion culling seems to make the non-pro iphone version pretty useless for any 3d-game that isnt extremely optimized…and it’s probably to make those kind of games that hobbyists migrate to / pick up Unity in particular I think.
Well, I have another little 2d-project going for which I can probably continue to use Unity 3 without problems.
Thanks for the input, dreamora - you’re as informative as always