New model is lagging BAD..

#1 Update your video card drivers if you haven't lately. I placed a 3000 poly model in my game, and my fps dropped immensely. After updating my driver, the fps barely dropped at all.

#2 Willbkool is right...

#3 Ok.. just got the most revent drivers, and it IS slightly better, but still pretty bad... got any other ideas? :/

#4 Are you using LOD meshes?

#5 What would those be? :/ im pretty new on this all, so excuse the ignorance.. ;)

#6 Well, they wouldn't really impact the game if not being there on a single mesh. But if you have lots of characters and at different ranges, this will slow down the game alot.

You can assign LOD meshes either using the MultiRes plugins in 3D Studio MAX, or doing it manually (which is sometimes preferred).

You can do alot of cool effects with LOD meshes too, but in particular performance tuning is done for the most part.

You need to assign different nodes for all the meshes too.
Say detail100 is your full detail one, and detail 10 is your lowest..

There is a pretty clean example on how to do this if you look in the documents. Although that didn't fully make me understand when I was new, it certainly helped.

Take a look at the Realm Wars orc and "copy" the architecture from that to your model. Should work.

#7 Hm.. would a cfg file do anythin for me? dont have one in there for the model, should i?

#8 You should read the exporter docs thoroughly and carefully, especially the ones for 3d studio max.

#9 The modeler being used is blender.. however im taking no part in the creation of the models.. i'll talk to my modeler about it all..

#10 By any chance are you scaling the model dynamicly in game(by setting its scale value), because I experienced this earlier in development, all i did was scale my model to the size I needed it to be in 3dsmax.

#11 Jacob,

(In Blender)
Have you tried exporting the model with "Triangle Strips" turned on? (note : you will need vtk and the vtk python bindings installed and working for this to work).

In addition, are you sure the model isn't being exported with double sided faces? (There is a mesh option in blender to turn this off)

#12 I am surprised that no one has asked about texture usage yet. How many textures are being used on the models and what resolution are each of the textures at?

A lot of artists who are new to this stuff will use a wide variety of textures on a single model (ie. more than 2) and at very large and unnecessary resolutions. This in turn greatly affects the performance of the game because of wasted resources. Now what I just said here is a generalization so don't get upset at me if it isn't the case in your situation here.

Loga

#13 Well, the faces ARE double sided.. Thats yet to be corrected, but i didint think it would cause this big of a performance hit.. I mean, i can get about 10 player models without any probs at all, but 2 of these models and i lag to hell. Also, only 1 materail at 512x512. However it lagged without the material as well. There are no LoD meshes tho, we havent worked that out yet... Would this perhaps be a source of the lag?

#14 You should get somebody to run the profiler and see if it's rendering or something else that's slowing things down.