Polygon counter

#1 Answer: enough

serriously..Thats like asking "how much food can a person eat for dinner?"

It depends on a ton of things.. Please be more specific..

#2 Frankly, the number of polygons you push isn't really the limiting factor anymore. I easily push 1 to 2 million polygons to my card using an other engine. Cards can handle a crapload of polygons nowadays thanks to hardware buffers.

And like the previous poster said, it depends on a lot of things. What lighting method do you use, how do you handle animation, the various vertex and pixel shaders you have in your scene, ad inifinum.

You could get the answer to your question if you asked it very specifically, exactly like it would be for your setup but even then I don't think people would know.

This question has nothing to do with TSE really, any graphics engine supporting all the modern techniques will have have aproximately the same results. And it is also too early in the development of TSE to ask that question, there isn't proper lighting and shadows yet :)

#3 Oow.. i see, thanks for the explanation Mr. Desplat. hmm, specifically, how many polygons (maximum) are there for each character model in TSE ?

#4 The space orc uses 4.5k I believe..

#5 Characters are toughies, I would say the strict maximum to go would be around 15k polys. The problem with characters is that they are animated. I have no idea if TSE supports hardware skinning yet but you could probably go a bit beyond that number with hardware skinning.

The good thing though is that you don't need to have a lot of polygons to have a lot of details. That's where normal maps come in handy and they're truly useful. So then you could reduce the number of polygons of your characters to a much much more reasonable number than 15k and still have great detail without sacrifying so much performance. Some shadowing techniques are highly affected by how many polygons your characters have. That's why the doom3 models can seem so blocky at times. (I would kill to have that quality for models though :) )

Warning: I don't have much experience with animated entities, I am a rather crappy modeller and prefer static models so hum please correct me if I said something stupid.

#6 Does tse already support normal map? i have downloaded the HEAD version from CVS.. but it seems there is no normal map feature in it..

#7 Yah you have to use the material system (ie add amaterial mapping/definition combo).. read the TSE help file in the doc directory under TSE root