[shmerl]

Idea of levels or areas isn't always applicable, and in vast open space games like Star Citizen or Witcher 3 with tons of random events you might need to load / free something pretty regularly I suppose, and it should happen seamlessly (i.e. if some event is triggered or passed).

So limiting lifetime of the object by some scope should work pretty well for it, and if you can pass raw pointers to transfer ownership, you can as well pass managed ones. At least it's safer.

Anyway, by using something like Rust a lot of such problems are solved by the language itself.

[sillysaurus3]

The idea of levels or areas is always applicable. A vast open game like Star Citizen is partitioned into area spaces, usually in a cubic array. When you move out of range of one of the cubes, past the point where you can see it, then all resources in that cube can be safely freed.

I don't know where Rust came from, since the discussion was about C++. But feel free to write an engine in Rust. It seems like a promising approach.

[shmerl]

I hope it will happen eventually, especially with projects like this: https://github.com/tomaka/vulkano