what's the point of mesh-streaming in games?

[KongRudi]

As the title suggest...

I read somewhere that Killzone 3 had new texture- and mesh-streaming engine.
Texture-streaming I know abit about and is not hard to find info about, but mesh-streaming most of the info I find is abit to advanced for me to understand.. :-/

So I have a few questions wich I hope you can help me with.
1. is streaming a mesh normal in games?
2. If not, what other games do it?
3. and most importantly, what is the pro's and cons of streaming them?

 

[tabs]

1. I'd say so, at least for games that have large 'levels'.
2. Fallout 3, Oblivion, GTA 4, Just Cause 2.. anything that has a large world does it for sure. They will do it in different ways though. Oblivion loaded up big square chunks of world at a time, GTA4 is more granular.
3. It allows you to have a level made up of meshes that would normally cause the game to exceed it's memory limits. i.e. you can have bigger worlds with more geometric detail.

 

[KongRudi]

ok, thanks for quick, and easy to understand, response.

Should have realized it, because the only other thing I knew wich used it were Google-earth.
I just assumed 'game-worlds' were small and undetailed enough to easily fit the meshes beeing used into memory, and got confused since I've never read anything of mesh-streaming used with games before. :-/