As I've mentioned multiple times before, the content load for this game is probably about two orders of magnitude larger than what I was planning to do when I first started :) I don't really have any excuse for this.

What quickly became clear, however, is that it was intractable to manage the large number of explorable backgrounds with the way I had been doing them previously - namely that each individual shot in a scene was a separate frame of animation in a MAX file, and that frame was marked up with an identifier. Then later, in a code (or data file, depending on how you look at it), I would have to manually specify the linkages between identifiers to connect up the scenes. With scene counts over 100, this becomes somewhat ridiculous, especially for one person to manage when they're already doing everything else on the game as well.

So today I switched to using individual camera objects placed in the MAX scene, and then parented them to their appropriate connected parent. Since the scene layout in Sushi is a tree, not a graph (due to the pre-rendered nature, it would have to introduce Myst-like "rotate around" kinds of controls in order to be a graph and not be supremely confusing), this works OK, and gets around the fact that a custom plugin to do this sort of thing would be very difficult to do in MAXScript, and I'm trying to keep as little as possible in compiled plugins due to the fragility of upgrading MAX versions when such things are involved.

I then wrote some MAXScript to allow me to navigate through the scene by hopping from camera to camera using a forward/back/next/prev kind of system, which works quite well and approximates the navigation as the player actually does it in the game.

I still have a fair bit of work ahead before the new pipeline is totally operational and rendering complete scenes at the new massive polygon counts, but at least everything is more or less outside of MAX now, which is the only way the bigger scenes were ever going to get rendered. Scene assembly inside MAX has always been pretty much a non-starter, and I suffered mightily through it for the previous builds of the game. So I'm happy to be closing in on a fully running pipeline that can handle arbitrary polygon loads.