open-world-streaminglisted

# 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 (`unity`, `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 ``` The player must never reach a cell before it's ready. When the inequality fails you have exactly six levers, all used by shipped games: cap traversal speed (Spider-Man PS4), reduce LOD at high speed (GTA V flight), widen lookahead in the movement direction (velocity prediction), shrink per-cell payload (Ghost of Tsushima's 2 MB tiles), improve IO (SSD-first pipelines), or hide the load behind a transition (fast-travel fade). ## System anatomy A streaming system is five components; build them in this order (see [components.md](./components.md) for each in detail): 1. **Partitioning** — the world divided into cells (uniform grid by default: 128 m dense city, 256 m mixed, 512 m sparse) with content assigned per cell at build time. 2. **Streaming sources** — points of interest (player, cinematic camera, teleport destinat