Polygon = Triangles in game development terms most of the time.
Often the words are interchanged by artists and programmers alike.
Quote: " would like to know what is the best polygon number, to an object that is gonna be repeated around 50 times...e.g I'm doing an asteroid field problem is that each asteroid has 5118 polygons so around 50.. 229324 polygons"
Well depending on the graphics card you're aiming the low-end to be will determin if the polycount is alright or not.
As far as current budget cards go (6200/7300/8400) you're really looking at 50 of those being quarter of your entire polygon budget. This said in space that isn't so bad really as they are the terrain really.
You optimise scenes based on what will be visible, and what else will be in it.
Quote: "that polycount is waaay too high for any object in almost any game. if i were making an asteroid, it would have around 300-400 polys. "
if you were still in the dark ages perhaps, the DBP engine itself isn't so bad with polycounts and can usually get close to what the card can push.. the performance really takes a nose dive when dealing with lots of alpha, effects and such. all those graphical lush you come to expect in modern games.
what i would say is that, it is probably a good idea having some nice LOD variations of a model that are swapped at reasonable distances. i'd also recommend planning out scenes before deciding on polycounts.
things with performance and polycounts get more tricky when dealing with shaders; as you have to figure out the performance difference between the complexity of a shader, plus between versions of shader models and how many vertices a model has plus the fillrate (polygons textured & mapped)
Quote: "If you use bump mapping you can bring that face count way down.
Just Googled this http://www.filterforge.com/filters/3215.html "
Sometimes a higher polygon count with a traditional T&L engine will run quicker than a low polygon model with a Shader engine. Depends on so many things really.
as i keep saying, so many aspect do depend entirely on what is in the scene itself. if it's just the asteroids themselves, then you can very easily have 200 at that polycount without any dip below 60fps.
