Open-World Streaming

Build a world larger than memory by loading only what surrounds the player — the cell-level streaming system, the sub-cell rendering frontier underneath it, and the procedural-generation/living-world layers around it. This skill is the engine-agnostic architecture blueprint: components, data flow, budgets, build order, and failure modes. Engine tooling specifics live in the engine mapping section and the dedicated engine skills (unity6-aaa-best-practices, ue5-aaa-best-practices).

The core invariant

Everything in a streaming system serves one inequality:

lookahead_distance ≥ max_speed × (t_io + t_decompress + t_activate) + margin