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3 Dimensional Chat / Acceptable polygon count for FPS characters

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Zappo
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Posted: 13th Jan 2005 00:55
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I was wondering if anyone had any guidelines on polygon counts for FPS characters in DarkBasic. I looked around and found some of these stats from various sources (which may or may not be accurate) but they strike me as being waaaaay too high

Quake3 character - between 900 and 1000 polys
Halflife character - between 1000 and 2000 polys
Doom3 character - about 5000 polys
Halflife2 character - up to 10000 polys (listed as 10 times the capability of HalfLife)

To nicely have 3 or 4 bad guys on screen in a simple room and on a reasonable machine & graphics card, what would you recommend for their poly counts?
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Van B
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Posted: 13th Jan 2005 01:22
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I'd say my PC was reasonable, and it can cope with 40k poly's with no problems, so if you say 5000 for your room, you can go to a fairly extreme polycount with just a few characters.

I stick below 2000 though, because the more poly's you have, the trickier it is to animate and texture, plus there's no point wasting polygons when you don't really need that level of quality - personally I tend to keep mine very low, like 700 polygons, but that's aimed at an engine handling 32 of these plus everything else in the game. Half Life is a pretty reasonable guideline for DBPro media - so all those HL Milkshape tutorials are well suited to us.


Van-B


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Shadow Robert
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Posted: 13th Jan 2005 01:48
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Quote: "Quake3 character - between 900 and 1000 polys
Halflife character - between 1000 and 2000 polys
Doom3 character - about 5000 polys
Halflife2 character - up to 10000 polys (listed as 10 times the capability of HalfLife)"


Quake3 uses LOD Models:
Low - 500 : Med - 750 : High - 1000

Half-Life:
Large Group Monsters - upto 350 (headcrabs, screamers, baracles, baby crabs)
Small Group Monsters - upto 1000 (Zombies, Military, Scientists)
Single Monsters - upto 2500 (Gargantua, Bosses)

Doom3: Again uses LOD but this time in-engine
General Monsters : 1,500-2,000 (Imp / Zombies / Helldog)
Special Monsters : 2,000-2,500 (Cacodemon, Skeleton dudes i forget the name of)
Bosses : 4,000 (self descriptive)

Half-Life 2 : This uses different mesh densities depending on the the Model level.

Low - upto 2,500
Medium - upto 5,000
High - upto 8,000

When developing games the polycounts rely very heavily on alot of factors. You have to take from your 'pool', however you have to adjust your pool depending on other factors.

I'll explain this later with some code to show what I mean in a practical sense.
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Zappo
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Posted: 13th Jan 2005 21:04
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Thanks for the updated data Leyvin. The size of the 'poly-pool' is something which requires trial-and-error, I suppose. I am hoping to give the scenery a very low poly count and compensate with good use of texture and lighting. With any luck this will leave enough resources for fast paced action.

Many thanks Van B for your suggestions. It looks like I now need a small crowd of people so I am hoping to get away with a 250 poly model I made previously for each of them (and some clever texture mapping to hide the rough bits) and maybe some 700 poly models for 3 or 4 main characters on screen at once. Its really only the heads that require detail.
MilkShape certainly is the tool for this kind of work.
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Posted: 14th Jan 2005 07:20
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Leyvin is right. The "norm" these days are around 4000-4500

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Badname's FREE MODEL PACKS @ http://forum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=42656&b=3
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Van B
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Posted: 14th Jan 2005 16:34
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But DBPro is not the norm, the DBPro engine is around the same speed as the original HL engine, so use that as a guide - not Doom3!. I'm sure Leyvin would agree that a 4k poly character in DBPro is a bad idea unless it's a beat-em-up with only a couple of characters on screen.


Van-B


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Mr Underhill
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Posted: 17th Jan 2005 01:52
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Quote: "But DBPro is not the norm, the DBPro engine is around the same speed as the original HL engine, so use that as a guide - not Doom3!. I'm sure Leyvin would agree that a 4k poly character in DBPro is a bad idea unless it's a beat-em-up with only a couple of characters on screen."


Agreed. 1000-2000 is your best bet. I've done some pretty good models in that range, so it's certainly possible. Just be sure to get a really, really good texture.

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Posted: 17th Jan 2005 02:00
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umm i think that depends on the skill of the coder althought i cant code nothing, but there are these dbpro games wich have 3 fps :/
Back in the days of the alienware compo i saw some never send in test stuff and those were quite some polys...

And doom3 has polycounts like Quake2 just check out how spiky the heads are


http://forum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=42656&b=3
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