Poly Count - or FAQ

#1 tdn.garagegames.com/wiki/DTS/FAQ/General_FAQ
Characters - 2250 polygons
Vehicles - 1500 polygons
Weapons - 500 polygons

#2 I would consider what's said in there, but also it's much dependant on your game than to say directly like that.

Will you have lots of vehicles moving about? Then you might want to take it easy with the numbers on them.
As with a regular FPS with only very few vehicles, you might want to increase it and maybe be light on the playermodels. Etc.

It's all dependant on your game.

Edit: Oh and.. your target audience..

#3 We're working on a third-person platform adventure game. you'll hvae two characters at a time at the screen, probably fighting 2-3 enemies at once and 1-zero vehicles.

Target audience: E for everyone.

#4 When I said target audience, I was referring to what kind of audience with *what hardware*.
Most of the people here target lowspec systems, while some of us don't.

~5 characters on screen at once isn't much, by the way.

#5 Hi Michael.
The only bit of advice I can give you about poly count is keep it as low as possible - it can't hurt regardless of what you're doing. You really have to get a sense as to what 2000+ polys "looks like" and the art of building low-poly count models is (as I've recently found out) quite its own art form.
I would recommend shooting for lower polycounts (under 2000) as it is an easy matter to add more detail if you have poly budget left over.

@ Anyone/everyone: what is torques total poly budget? I have 50,000 stuck in my head right now, is that about right.

#6 James, like said above:

It's highly game specific and depends on your target hardware.
Torque can handle TONS of polygons, but without knowing anything about your target hardware and how the game is designed, it's not possible to say.

#7 I've deleted my response as I realized I'd misunderstood the Stefan's response above.
I've done research online and spoke to co-workers - I'll stick with my 12 years of production experience from now on and watch my comments ;)

Now for some coffee :)

#8 Good luck James!

#9 I recommend Show Tool Pro. Pulling some existing models into it will show you the poly count and tons more (everything DTS has is shown). Helps give better grasp for beginners too.

www.garagegames.com/pg/product/view.php?id=59

#10 Keep in mind that the poly count in showtool pro is a bit missleading though as it includes degenerated triangles. There can sometimes be hundreds of these "empty" polygons that are never rendered. They're there because the exporters adds extra triangles to stitch everything together into one long strip rather than having several short strips.

That's a bit of an simplified explaination I suppose, but in either case my point is; the poly count shown in showtool pro usually isn't the amount of polygons the object had before exporting, or the amount of polygons that actually need to be rendered by torque.

#11 For a beginner like he is I think it would be an excellent tool to have. Like I said in my post "tons more". I think it should be close enough as far as your last comment about the total amount. The final test of course is in game performance.

#12 Don't get me wrong, I love showtool pro. I use it every day! It's an essential tool for anyone dealing with torque models.

I'm just saying that if you look at a model in showtool and it shows say 2000 polygons and you then go and make a model of your own with 2000 polygons it may end up as 2500 in showtool (but only because the original figure of 2000 in showtool actually was 1500). Hope that makes sense. Just got up so I need some coffee now. =)

#13 Sorry to reawaken this thread but rather do that then start another :)

Am I right to think that based on Stefan's response there are no hard coded restrictions on Polycounts or the number of bones you can have?

And on that note, is there no restriction (or is there?) on the size of your UV textures (<= 1024) or the number a single mesh can support (2x256 + 1x512)?

Thanks in advance.

I'd check out TDN but I find the experience currently frustrating - damn log-in thing...

Cheers!

edit: spelt Stefan's name wrong -ooops

#14 There is a 512*512 texture size restriction, but no model polycount restrictions.

#15

Quote:
There is a 512*512 texture size restriction, but no model polycount restrictions.

No such thing as a 512*512 size restriction on textures.

#16 There isn't? What is the texture limit?

#17 There's no hard texture limit imposed by torque itself (other than possibly on terrains? I haven't gotten around to mess with that yet).

What will set the limit is the graphics card you use, most cards should handle up to 4096x4096 (but not all mind you!), keep in mind that ONE 4096x4096 texture would take up around 50mb of texture memory or so...

Bottom line is, like everything else, keep it as small as possible.

#18 Thanks Magnus. That's the kind of answer I was looking for. I've been doing a comparison of Torque and Unreal and what they've done is (I think) made recommendations.

That's all that is being asked here.

If there are no restrictions on size or number of textures, polys and bones a Player Character can have, I will set my own guidelines for the team and TEST IT!

Which is the only way to know for sure :)

My Starting point will be this (since I want to include low end machines).
Player Character:

Polys: 2000 - 3000
Textures: <= 512
Max Textures: <=3 (mix of sizes allowed - 512, 256, 128 etc)
bones: <= 50

I think that's a fair level to start with and is comparable to Unreal. We'll see how well openGL will handle it on our test machines :)

Thanks again.

#19 Some of the earlier 3D cards were limited to 256 x 256 (and lower) textures, so you may want to bear that in mind if you wish to support very low end machines.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure how many of the ones that work with TGE have this limitation.

#20 Wow... 2048*2048 textures look so awesome!