Occlusion culling help flight sim style game?

Been reading up that occlusion culling is mainly for fps style games.

I'm working on a flight sim style game (ie player not on ground often) for iphone where you fly over terrain, etc and wanted to find out if occlusion calling would help if the player is flying?

Is it only for player that stay on the ground?

I don't have unity pro or iPhone pro but I am considering it to help performance mainly for occlusion calling.

Thoughts?

 

It depends on how many objects could actually be occluded in your flying game. If it's a flat terrain and the player is flying high up then occlusion culling won't help at all. If on the other hand the player is flying low through canyons etc then occlusion culling might be beneficial.

Also keep in mind that with a flying game you would need to generate an awful lot of cells since the camera can go almost anywhere in the game world.

In general occlusion culling would not be very helpful for a flying game.

 

Also kind of depends on if it's just a terrain, or a terrain with buildings, trees, and other scenery all over it. In that case I think you'd definitely want to look at some form of occlusion culling to at least limit those scenery models.

 

Thanks for the responses.

The game is mostly steep canyon type terrain with primitive huts, structures on the sides of the canyon, and enemies walking around. Not many trees at all.

But as was mentioned you can fly way above the canyon which may defeat the benefits ...

So is it safe to say that the more number of cells the more performance may suffer?

Any tips to help performance otherwise for a flight sim style of game for iPhone platform?

 

1. lod
2. fade out objects which are far away
3. make the terrain out of mesh chunks so they can at least be culled at max draw distance. Probably too expensive and not worth realtime roam style terrain.
4. go easy on any transparent clouds etc.