They should scrap the PS3 version.

[Abriael]

Yes they do. As I said, the only evidence of stream we have are LOD assets (as per the benchmark for example) also the PS3 videos shown so far don't show any of the typical artifacts that would be present if the game was streaming local assets.

This means that it is highly unlikely that ARR engine supports asset stream as say UE3 might.

ARR's engine is based on Luminous, that does support asset streaming.

This is also why it makes sense that zone size is restrictive as it is. Your zone size itself has no impact on network performance. From the network side, the main reason they went with a zoning system is that they can hard cap the amount of players that are in any given zone and this allows them to determine a solid capacity number they can work with.

It's not just that. If you have smaller zones and your content is well spread, your population will automatically be spread between more zones, resulting in less traffic per server in the cluster.

It's far more likely that zone size is a product of assets they can load in a given area and if you start stretching your assets thin then you end up with the old 1.0, cut-n-paste and barren areas which I am sure they wanted to avoid at all costs.

They don't need to stretch anything thin. Even if the areas aren't cut and paste, every game has themed texture packages. If you look at every ARR video and the benchmark you'll see that textures and models are kept consistent throughout a zone. They just aren't arranged in larger tiles for ease of placing like 1.0 did.

Which means that it doesn't really matter if a zone is 10000 square feet or 40000. The assets are still pretty much the same. They are just repeated in a much more clever and less sloppy way than they were in 1.0.