Make something Unreal !

#21 Well now that we're here [*looks around*] care to explain what you mean by "practically ENDLESS polygon capabilities" Talon? Now I'm curious.

#22 According to the Unreal 3 tech page, characters are:

Quote:
* Renderable Mesh: We build renderable meshes with 3,000-12,000 triangles, based on the expectation of 5-20 visible characters in a game scene.
* Detail Mesh: We build 1-8 million triangle detail meshes for typical characters. This is quite sufficient for generating 1-2 normal maps of resolution 2048x2048 per character.
* Bones: The highest LOD version of our characters typically have 100-200 bones, and include articulated faces, hands, and fingers.

And scenes are:

Quote:
Typical environments contain 1000-5000 total renderable objects, including static meshes and skeletal meshes. For reasonable performance on current 3D cards, we aim to keep the number of visible objects in any given scene to 300-1000 visible objects. Our larger scenes typically peak at 500,000 to 1,500,000 rendered triangles.

Not shabby by any means (and actually, really sweet), but not endless by any extent of the imagination, either.

EDIT: Source (http://www.unrealtechnology.com/html/technology/ue30.shtml)

#23 Comparing the editors..

I have worked (not on 'professional level') on UnrealEd in the past (Unreal, DeusEx, UT2k4). I would say its editor has excellent features to create ANY possible mod/tc out there (the reason why it has this huge list of mods). The only part where it fails is the way everything has been overcomplicated. I mean for creating a simple terrain you have to go through different layers and god know what else (UT2004 Ed). It just takes the fun out of modding.

Now compare that to D3 Editor (or even Q3..since editor features are somewhat similar), and D3 takes the lead from the word go. You can make anything ten times faster than UnrealED. Tools are to the point (though not as many.. but that has changed in Quake Wars) and without any unneeded complications/steps. Plus half of the stuff uses its own editor which can be run while testing (separately, like Particle Editor, Sound Editor, GUI Editor.. which is god damn impressive FYI).

In the end, I would just like to say that UnrealED, though complicated, can be used to create awesome mods (and the engine, though not as good looking as D3, can support vast open areas.. not to mention they have a really good documentation as a wiki).