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#1 Jim: I'm sure you've read during your searching that the answer to your question is based on many variables like; End user cpu, ram, video card, texture sizes, polygons, etc.. Not to mention the total amount of models and textures along with their respective sizes which are loaded at the same time inside your game.

What many developers do is select a 'target' machine and test their game levels on this machine. This is how they get the information on software package that says "Recommended system specs" and "Required system specs". Testing, testing, testing. Isn't game devleopment great? :)


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Edit: To answer your question: 2500-3500 polys would be a good place to start, but depending on the system specs of the machine you are targeting, this might need to be adjusted once you get to test how all the assets of your game level work when loaded in the actual game.

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#3 Bah! You call 9000 excessive?!? That's crazy! I like to go crazy with the polycounts...but for my game I'm keeping it to a low 2000s. Yet, my fighting game I've been hired to do pushes it to the max.

#4 For our game we had the characters around 2500 triangles and 56 bones (number of bones makes a big difference as well!) and it was fine-ish with one or two characters in the game, but when we started getting more it slowed to a crawl. I revamped all the characters to be around 1200 triangles with only 41 bones, and it makes a big difference. And the difference in quality is hardly distinguishable. I'd recommend going as low as possible. You'll be surprised what you can get away with when a good texture is applied. Look at Doom 3, super low polys with high res textures and normal maps.

#5 Basically the only way to know for sure is to test your models. In a game (or even a scene in your game) where you only have one model it's obviously fine to have 10.000 polygons (although the exporters seem to choke on models somewhere in the 9000-range), if you have 200 models seen at the same time you of course have to go much lower.

I'm trying to keep the models I'm working on right now at around 1500 (they have about 30 bones), except for a few of the bigger models. The one I'm working on right now have closer to 4000 triangles and 80(!) bones. I hope it will work out okay in the engine =).

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#7 My models are usually slightly higher than they end up in the end too when they're "done". When you have your model done it's easier to see where you can start to optimize things.

But anyway, try it out. If it becomes slow you'll just have to bite the bullet and start removing polygons.

#8 I've recently been having issues with TSE and the poly count. I have a model at a bit over 10,000 poly. Loads just fine in TGE, but TSE crashes. Would this be from poly count or possibly something else?

#9 My guess would be that it's because TSE just has so many other things going on at the same time, that your computer can't handle as high of a poly count.