As I have stated before the biggest issue that Rhino has with something like this: it’s handling of large textures, but in V8, that is supposed to be better because the disk caching is supposed to be going away. Rhino does have adaptive degradation, but if favors geometry simplification–rather than texture simplication, and it’s only when you move.
In fairness Rhino isn’t a game engine. I will also state, the things that make this a challenge–also affect architects who need to see their building in a city setting. Nudge, nudge, know what I mean?
[If Rhino had some work on material handing–and the ability to map a texture to a any surface with only a few clicks, to fit a texture, say, 3x2 across like GTK Radient, and with support for no-draw materials, it would be a dream editor for video game. The powers that be have added OCS frame Mapping (Thank you), and while it’s a foundation, we still need the tiling tools. Fortunately, blocks have been getting better for texture-swapping, and so forth. The problem is: unless you have used a real game level editor, you have no idea how fast textures can be applied. If you have used Max, Blender, Maya, or a lot of the others, you are used to texture tools which are not optimized for linear and paneling in 2-axis. You could click on a surface, apply a material, and it could fit x and y copies–in only a few clicks, even faster than decals, which are still pretty cool in their own right. I wasn’t that fast, but I could do 5,000 textured objects a month (brushes). I meant to make a video showing it, but my health hasn’t been good. I am just getting back into the swing of things.]
Well, you are just creating source material, correct?
The work areas could be broken up into sections, each could be put on separate layers or in separate files; this would help you work on a section at a time.
Rhino’s Blocks would allow you to have a library of buildings. These could be linked, so others could work on them. The blocks could be swapped with low-poly, small texture, versions. On the positive, Rhino’s NURBS allow remeshing in a way that’s just not possible in Sub-D editors. Any day you want, you could mesh a cylinder as smooth as glass, or reduce it to a prism shape–because it’s based from the NURBs geometery.
Another issue is: Rhino has no built-in imposter system, so you would have be in charge of making simplified versions of your buildings, for viewing at a distance. In other words, you would have to swap out the farther buildings to more simple ones, just like a game engine would. This is an issue that game-engines are written to deal with, from the old MIP maps, to creating several versions of NURB models from the old Id family engines. Most video cards would choke on the amount of memory needed to do a city–if there was no simplification.