Poly counts

[Captain_Bruce]

I was wondering about how in the old days of Armada we worried about poly counts to no end because we wanted our models not to slow the game down, is that still relevant? I mean most of our computers could probably run multiple copies of armada without slowdown, my machine is 5+ years old and I can run 6 copies of armada without problems, so do we still need to worry about the number of polys we draw? Obviously, there is a limit to this, but should we still be trying to shave models under 1000 poly counts?

[MrVulcan]

It seems that there isn't a simple linear trend between poly-count and performance (or framerate). It is true that new machines have specs that might be 10 times better than the min requirements for running armada, but I still wouldn't try recommend making models with 10 000 polies .

Having said that, I have accidentally made a sod with close to 20 000 polies. It loaded fine in Storm, albeit it took a while to load the model. I think this also depends on the number of individual meshes in a model; the one with 20 000 polies had six. That may have helped with performance as the individual meshes were each under 4000.

Anyhow, staying under 3000 polies is a safe bet. Most of the Future Tense models are actually around 2500, but then we're often using 3-6 texture files, each at 512 x 512. If you're not going to use high-res textures, you can definately go for a higher poly count.