🚀 go-pugleaf

Greetings.

I'm thinking of writing a strategy game which should implement a rather large
map (ie. preferably an arbitrary size in the excess of 10,000 x 10,000 squares).

Can someone suggest an algorithm (or a source even) to efficiently manage
such a beast? 

The matter is complicated by the fact that elevation, etc will be taken into
account so I need to be able to perform line-of-sight calculations and the
like.  

I have considered (and basically discarded) a number of internal compression
schemes but discared them for various reasons ranging from performance to
insufficient compression ratios. (actually, a basic runlength compression
scheme seemed kinda promising, but having to decompress various chunks of
data for line-of-sight calculations, etc seems to get quite expensive 
alarmingly quickly)

I've also looked at the quadrant method, but found that unless my map turns
out to be fairly homogenous I can't be certaint that I'll be able to load a
significant chunk of it.

So, is there a good, solid approach to managing this much data (I'd really
prefer to avoid disk swaps if at all possible) at once? (personally, I have
5 megs of RAM to play with but would much prefer it ran in significantly
less that this)

Like they say... 90% of a good program is picking the right algorithm :)

Thanks in advance for any help.

Thorsten Schiller
tschiller@cayley.uwaterloo.ca