brad <
polycounts are a lil iffy to judge in a space sim.
for one thing, you have no (not literaly, but they are negligible) environmental polys, so you pretty much have all the resources that normall go into the entire scene now available for just the models.
also, polygonal saturation hasn't happened yet. texture saturation has.
most games (90+%) slow down due to texture size, not polycounts.
quite literally, you can double tex rez, and see half the fps (or less if you run out of agp mem). you can double the polycount, and see a 10% drop in fps.
developers have been using textures more and more, and not saturating polycounts at the same rate. so there is a _lot_ of headroom, hardware wise, for polys.
some side effects are, you can MIP away texture rez, but you can't do that for polys. so usually polys are done for the lowest-common-denominator, while textures are done for the middle or best machines.
this is just to guarantee that crap computers wont choke on it.
but anything purchased in the last 2 years or so (not the super machines, just mid range), will not choke if we have, for example, all 30K models. (as i said, no environment to worry about, just player models. that frees up a couple hundred thousand faces)
there is too much old-dogs-new-tricks going on with polygons in the game industry. people are re teaching the ways of the old, when pcs really didnt have the juice. i do _not_ mean it's ok to waste polys, but really... we shouldn't think in a quake2/3 frame of mind about todays models.
an nvidia 6600 (the recent crap card) offers so many tris a second, that in priv remake you could put in the original models (art ones), and the fps wouldn't drop below 60.
piotr <
contact me via
aim : scheherazade0xf
icq : 4189579
msn : scheherazade at strategyplanet.com
i'll tell you the modelling conventions for making addon parts.
we'll get your upgrades working and in game
-scheherazade