Apart from ideal proportions, what would be a good convention for
how tall/wide/deep a character is (in pixels)? I forget what the
Quake2/3 convention was. I'm looking for proportions that (a)
keep the polygon count reasonable (b) don't distort textures overly.
On the same topic, given current graphics cards, what would be
an upper limit for polygon complexity? I'm all ears.
To elaborate further; I'm planning on writing a game a bit like a cross between System Shock 2, Fallout and Half-Life; so it would require quite a few mobs (maybe not quite as much as a shooter-fest).
Also, the engine will do backface culling and BSP so quite a lot of triangles won't even end up on the pipeline. Most games do this so
I don't know if this information is useful.
To elaborate to the extremum, it's not going to use a commercial engine; the engine is written from scratch. It's been a kind of
'world's strongest-man pull-a-truck-with-your-teeth' coding project
with lots of broken pencils and scrunched up paper.
The goal is to have something to show a good software company. In
terms of media I've done a few midis for the music which are at
the moment a bit ordinary. It's rapidly approaching the time where
mobs and interactive models should be introduced, hence the posting.
In that case since your writing the code shouldn't you be telling us how much you have to work with?
But for arguments sake, hypothetically, if you build an engine capable of today's FPS specs then you could, theoretically, push around models ranging from 2000 - 5000 tris easily depending on how many are on the screen.
Thanks.. I'll keep 2k triangles per mob @ 60FPS overall as an
estimate of upper bound i.e. code should not run slower than this.
It works very well ..for now.. but when other structures
have been added then that's where the delays will come in,
and so this benchmark is useful.
That way I'll know if the structures I'm using are good enough
or if they are pants and need to be redesigned.
2k per mob at 60FPS..2k per mob at 60FPS.. scribble scribble.
We're still peaking at around 4k tri's for current gen stuff next gen could see up to 15k (Unreal 3 will be about 10k.) Don't look for a lot of multiplayer action at this level though.