Chacal: this would reduce the load time and the memory footprint, and it would increase the frame rate (less stuff to draw).
Grogyan: It would be great to be able to do a fade between levels of detail. I think that's a built-in feature of Plasma, but I don't think we've deciphered that yet for our plugin.
Ehren: You're right - if someone is in the center, then they'll need to have a lot of the city geometry paged in. [Although we could have a heavy fog set in whenever someone goes to the hub...
]
Paradox and Aloys: I think we can avoid having barriers if we use long corridors between districts with a limited field of view. Right now, there are tunnels in between the subdistricts (the purple dots on the diagram), but there's just an open gap in the wall in between districts (the orange dots). As Aloys pointed out, there's more room around these between-district gaps, so maybe we can put in the long tunnels there? The tunnels help reduce the FOV, so our imposter images can be smaller.
Note: the catch about the paging region is that once the paging is begun, it cannot be interrupted. So, you cannot step out of the region once you've gone inside it. Even if you could, you'd have to restore the age back to what it was before you stepped in (page out the partial new district, page in the old district again), and that would still require waiting.
