So the basic idea is: the player is flying in a ship vehicle over the Deathstar. But my main concern is, of course, the detailed surface of that Deathstar. The "landscape" of the space station is obviouly quite extensive. If it was too detailed or too cluttered, it could major framerate troubles.

Could something be used to make a sort of map easy to run? I'm think along the lines of certains shaders and area portals, but haven't though extensively enough (and some ideas slip my mind now).

Keep in mind that I'm barely a neophyte mapper yet, but I think this may have a certain amount of validity:

During my travels through the internet's vast array of GTK tutorials, I recall reading something about a manually inserted function that prevents the engine from drawing architecture the player would not be able to see. (Places blocked from view by other pieces of architecture. I'm guessing you probably know about this, since you've been more dedicated to this business for a much longer period of time than I.

Anyway, my point being this: maybe this function could be exploited in a different way. Suppose you make your Death Star surface of modules, much like the artists who built the scale models for use in the films. (They could start with a basic surface piece which would have some kind of simple architectural piece comprised of 10 brushes or so, details coming from the texture and maybe an .m3D or two and variation through rotation of some modules. (What player is going to slow down to take an exceedingly close look at it anyway?)) Then, each module would be given a simliar script dictating that when the player was inhabiting the module, all modules at a distance of X away from it would be drawn. I'm guessing it would be quite tedious to do, but breaking the structures down to more simple pieces that could be dupicated could help.

Just an idea anyway. If I'm horribly wrong, here's hoping we can get a hearty laugh out of it.

That's called HINTing, and it's going to make VIS take forever.

You might want to consider a foghull, with _fogstart in worldspawn.

i think the most usefull option you can use is:

just make a very simple design of the death star...just a globe, then make some detail at the top of the death star and make the bottom of the deathstar detailed with texturing. When you place the camera's. Take care that they will not target too much at the bottom of the death star.

The other one i had was making diffrent models of diffrent places of the death star. So if you have a camera targeted at the top of the death star. Only show the top pieces you have modeled. If you have a camera under the death star, only show the bottom pieces of the death star. I will not say that this will not slow down the computer. Because actualy, the models are there. But you will prevent FPS loss due to the vision that the 'player (the one playing the game)' has.

My little two cents. That probaply look like crap.

Could there be a fogfull without the fog (and without HOM effects?)

With _fogstart, you can determine how far from the player the fog actually starts, so there'll be an area without fog. Foghull shouldn't give HOM anyway.

Hopefully you've not already seen this.

It's sparse, but seems to fit the points you outlined and may be worth looking into.

http://www.map-review.com/index.php?page=tutorial_view&id=17