It looks great but as soon as I get control of the character, the game starts to have extreme performance issues. My pc isn't the best, but I can still play games like Metro 2033 and Minecraft. And I would assume this game shouldn't be more demanding than those two.
wouldn't creating load zones help the performance? i suppose you dont need the opposite part of the map loaded at all times, for example. You could divide the maps into regions and only load the ones that are either touching the region that you're currently in or that are within render distance. And in case it breaks any of your scripts, perhaps also the one that has the checkpoint. Really there is no good reason for not doing that.