DRD Team

Basically there's this huge map I have, and when playing on my laptop the lag is extreme, this is because I use a lot of models and particles -and a laptop! Things speed up when all these models aren't in view so a way to hide models that are a specific distance away from a player's view would help, this would have to be fixed into the map cameras too else everything would disappear. Doomsday had a feature that would use sprites instead of models if the actor was a certain distance away, but I don't use sprites.

No - for a simple reason: It won't help sufficiently.
Although replacing a model with sprites will help a bit, all polygons in a model are rendered in one batch of instructions - which is relatively fast. By using sprites instead you will save some polygons - but not the processing overhead that really brings down performance.

As for fog that makes things disappear - never! Such a 'feature' only serves to hide bad design elsewhere.

Using sprites would only look good if appropriate sprites were in the mod anyway. It's not uncommon for people to use existing sprites to hang their models on, knowing they should never be seen.