First Project

General Discussion
1

Okay, I’m going to try to piece together the project I wanted the language for in the first place.

I’m going to build it up in stages, the first stage of which is designing the map system, modelling (eek!) the objects I need to display the map, and then building it all up into a scene and viewing it.

Before I get really carried away in blender and create way over complicated models, is there a rule of thumb for how many polys in a scene? I know it’s all dependent on hardware rather than the engine and this isn’t a question of how much can Panda cope with.

I have a good idea of how many objects, characters, and players I want in the scene, so if there is a rule of thumb, I can start calculating how many polys I can afford for each piece.

2

I’d also like to know what is considered “low poly” and “high poly” these days. I asked in another thread but it appears that thread has been deleted.

3

i stick to about 100K ploy per scene split at about 300 gems with about 100K of textures …

in the new gaming cards that are coming out you could get million of plyes. you use as much polygons you need and not one more.

4

Thanks for the guidelines. I know that modern cards can cope with way much more than my poor little laptop.

And I know that I should use all I need and no more, but I also know I’ll be tempted to make smoother and more detailed models than ‘needed’ so I figured I should try to keep myself in check at the start.

5

as far as poly models go, I wouldn’t go above 8000 for a main character. My Klonoa model shown here is 3500 polygons.

The texture you apply is more important than the number of polygons. A character that only has a few hundred polygons can be made to look 100x better if the texture map is done properly, such as hiding certain areas that may look a bit rough. Check out the upcoming Dragon Quest Monsters Jokers for the Nintendo DS - the characters don’t have nearly as many polygons as their counterparts in the PS2 Dragon Quest 8, yet they look pretty damn good due to their textures. If you look at most games using normal maps, such as Gears of War - you’ll see that some parts of a character are actually very low poly and angular, but its only really noticeable in the silhouette.

So again, I wouldn’t go above 8000 for the main character (I would probably try to go a lot less than that) or bosses.

6

The thing that most inexperienced game developers fail to take into account is the number of meshes in the scene. You want to keep that under 300, as treeform says.

7

why would anyone have that many meshes in a scene at once? that sounds like way too much.

8

300 is way to little!

Image you have a guy, he has a gun,hat, and 2 boots. That is 5 meshes so you can only have 60 of the guys running around to fit into 300 mesh limit … and that is not taking into account the surroundings!

9

Does it really matter how many meshes are in the SCENE, as opposed to how many are actually getting rendered at a time?

10

just rendered at a time.

11

i would think the amount of polys rendered at a time is more important than the amount of people. you can have 1000 people that are 2 polys.

12

well… you can. but 1000 people with 2 polys will be ways less efficient than 2 people with 1000 polys each. this is due to the hardware which is not suited to have tons of objects with only very few triangles/polys.
that’s why keeping the number of nodes below a few hundrets onscreen.
panda provides several optimisation to archive this goal, but most of them has a few drawbacks. generally they are working really good and performance can increase a lot if used right.
if you wanna test how much difference it makes … load a 1024x1024 terrain… this will be about 2mio triangles. most pc will be able to handle it… if you try to load only 10% or even 1% of the triangles in single nodes… well…try it out :smiley: