My idea comes from wargame, with its recon system and fog of war. Rather than trying to render as many units as possible to as far as the devs can. Why not work it to the games favour whitest possibly saving processing power. Have a systems like wargame where recon units have weapons that are much weaker then main fighting units, but they can spot thongs further away. A infil with a snipe scope could maybe spot targets 600m away, this then renders that unit to nearby units that cannot spot that far. Give infantry a spot range of like 300m, tanks 150m, air 50 for ground and 700 if the specialise in AA. 60m if the special in ground and 450 for air units. 450 for lighter vehicles. These are all example figures but it would mean the more powerful the weapon the more you rely on lighter units with weaker weapons to spot targets. I think it may be one of many ways to stop vehicle camping spawns etc. maybe people can stop calling for nerfs with the reduced camping. This would mean in larger fights air can be useful only if infantry utilise them, then can also be useful in defence by having targets up the air doesn't have to find targets meaning less time to get shot down by enemy air. Rendered targets by the CUD (command uplink device) would mean those targets can be hit by the air with Xp all round. Of course have counters for the bombs, warning systems to move etc. Lastly remove the Dorito spotting.
Distance isn't the problem with playable rendering Priority performance. Lack of culling behind walls and solid geometry is the problem. Even when you're not looking at those entities, it's constantly streaming the Memory data through your CPU cache for them every frame. Their textures, their sub-textures, their animations, attachments, particle effects, inverse kinematics, shadow data, interpolation, and atleast 2 extra sets of vectors and other states / doodads.
Im struggling to think how you thought adapting a system from an RTS is going to help here. And the idea of using spotter units works when theres 1 player controlling everything. Theres no such enviroment in PS2.
