Poly Count Opinions

#1 The polycount really depends on the type of game you're planning on doing, and specifically the target hardware you are intending this to run on.

if you're running it on an unaltered torque engine then you can test those things out on the demo application by adding the default player model (about 2000 polygons) as many times as you want to in the level editor creator to determine that amount.

if you're planning on having a thousand players on the screen at once then all of those are going to have to be rendered on the person's computer. A nice thing about the TGE is that it has an optimised LOD system support in which you can drastically cut down polycounts depending on how far a model is away from the player's view. i cant imagine it would be possible to have a thousand players close enough to the view in which they would need to be rendered at their highest LOD setting. so you can probably get away with alot if you keep a strict LOD system.

if you can do your levels with portal-based rendering then those models not in the immediate view wont be rendered but im not sure how TGE handles this cause i've never attempted level design with it. its definately not a new technology by any means. so you might want to ask in the level design forum.

i dont think there is a technical restriction on polycount set to a maximum number. its more of an arbitrary number based on the reasons stated above. i once tried to export a 500k sphere as a .dts shape to see if it would and it crashed the exporter so i could never test it in the game but ill tell you the results wouldnt be pretty. if you ever find the need to create meshes with polycounts that exceed 6k than you might want to look into other existing real-time technologies to implement like normal mapping, where a low-poly target is displaced based on a high-poly reference in real-time. the extracted high-poly ref can have an infinite polycount using that method.

personally for what you mentioned i would keep a low strict polycount (500 max) and a rigorous LOD system.

#2 Actually the numbers of players is more limited by network traffic than polycounts.

#3 Alright, great! Thanks for the input.

#4 It's not so much how many characters are in a game as how many polygons you expect to be on the screen at the same time. An FPS tends to be a faster playing game, so you could have a lot more polygons coming in and out of visibility all the time. Setting maximums for polygons on the screen at once during the design phase of art is a good idea.

I think I remember someone saying something about the exporter not being able to handle a larger number of polygons at once, so it's not neccessarily engine based. That being said I don't think Torque is the most efficient rendering engine but it could be. All you have to do is find someone who can do it ;).

#5 I think that Torque assumes 16/32 bits for a few fields. You can easily fix this. Just be aware if you plan on exceeding many ten thousands of polygons for your models :P

Note that those fields are per-mesh, so practically you can have nearly infinite numbers of polygons. :)

#6 (Or 4 billion, if it's 32 bits.)