This is mentioned in the linked article but a lot of the rendering work is done in the Level of Detail system that is standard in most game engines now. As the

This is mentioned in the linked article but a lot of the rendering work is done in the Level of Detail system that is standard in most game engines now. As the player camera moves further from an object, lower resolution versions of the 3D model replace the default high resolution model. Supcom takes this a step further, and at the furthest zoom levels, switches to a 2D sprite (a single quad with texture applied) for unit meshes. Other games have implemented this sort of thing now, like Planetary Annihilation, which was created by some of the original SupCom developers (warning: don't buy PA unless it's at a severe discount however as it's buggy, has poor game balance, no good single player campaign and a tiny multiplayer community). The Kerbal Space Program game's devblog also contains some interesting writeups regarding this kind of thing, like this one: http://kerbalspace.tumblr.com/post/9056986834/on-quadtrees-and-why-they-are-awesome http://kerbalspace.tumblr.com/post/9056986834/on-quadtrees-a...