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I'm thinking of making a clone of Dragon Force (sega saturn, amazing game) which would display hundreds of soldiers on screen at once. The original game used sprites but I'd much prefer to use polygons. I know I'll need really low poly counts on my characters, but I also know dbpro isn't the most optimized engine around. Just curious.

DBPro can handle billions upon billions of polygons. Your CPU/RAM/GFX card cannot however.

What you should do is to simply try it and see!

You're right of course, the thing is I don't know how low poly I should make my models. I was hoping to allow the player to zoom in and low poly looks so blah.

If you want the efficiency of low polies, with the quality of high polies, then perhaps look at using an lod system. Have a lower quality object when the camera is at a distance, then switch to a higher quality object when the camera is closer.

There are a few LOD systems you can use. The simplest is probably kaedroho's plugin. (Search the forum for it)

There is also this command Add LOD To Object. I've not used it yet, but it should work alright.

Run some tests; make some test models and run a simulation of what it will be like when you complete it. There is nothing wrong with making 1000s of textured planes or cubes and giving them random movement instructions just to make observations and tests to see your way through.

With lots of characters you'll probably want to have lower poly characters. Also LOD will be a big help.

There's some kind of bone animation shader floating around the forums that people are claiming increases graphics performance also.

Instancing has no effect on frame rate. However you might speed up your load times using it. At least use clone object otherwise.

As far as how many polys your characters should have, it really depends on the situation. A typical high quality character will probably have around 2000-3000 polys. DBP has been around a long time so "high quality" has changed over the years. Animating an army? You might drop that to 200-300. Try to keep the game below 50000 on-screen polygons as a rough measure.


Here's a direct comparison of polygon counts:

This character head is roughly 1000 polys.


This earlier version is roughly 300 polys with the same texture.


This is an older image showing the older face. The entire character is about 1900 polygons.


Being efficient and knowing how to position vertices and faces is very important. A lot of times you can reduce poly count a little and keep the same detail level. Also good positioning helps when animating. I'll leave it for someone else to explain this in more detail if there is interest.