as far as 13000 polies thats hardly movie grade mesh. Im basing my statement on what comercial games are using. Considering that our project is a beat 'em up type game (only two characters on screen with limited background) thats still not too overwelming. Ive loaded 6-7 instances of my model at a time on my 6yr old machine with barely a hiccup. Of course thats running in a viewer that was written in c++ using dx and not dark basic or fpsc. Regardless of what you want to call it the model focused here is extremely well designed concidering the poly count.
Just as an example mortal kombat deadly aliance averaged 7000 to 10000 polies per character, and ran on xbox. Were not talking ancient tech, but the available hp theses days can definately handle that and an environment. Shoot consider two characters @ 20000 polies and say another 40,000 in environment and a few thousand in props and your still at 60,000 or so polies. Thats nothing for todays equiptment.
I know im not considering mmos and other games with lots of instanced characters but still new equiptment gives you room to play. I remember back in the day when my pII would bog down playing duke3d because i made a map that had too many sprites. Those were the days of serious resource management lol. Anyway this is all getting way off topic. I still think the model displays good use of geometry.
