Game Scene Polygon Count Input needed

#1

Hi all. I am currently developing an open-sourced MMORPG using the Ogre3D engine. We are still early in development so it will be quite some time until we arrive at Beta, and release. This is where you input is needed. Our current polygon estimate for game models is around 3000 (for charadcters). Since this will be a MMO, it will have mainly outdoor scenes with many trees, plants, buildings, etc. Since it will be a long time until we will be at the release stage, I feel that I want to up my poly limit, since by then (2-3 years), the low, standard, and high end gfx cards will be able to handle so much more.

I have been looking all over the place (Gamasutra, GameDev, Google) for an idea of how I am going to make my estimate and have not found anything conclusive yet. I figure with all the artists around, someone might want to point me in the right direction.

My plans are to get the main tri-count that a good card can handle in one scene (with normal mapping and shaders), then estimate the amount of items that we will have in any given scene. This is assuming that a good card from today will be the low end card in 2-3 years. Current trends would say I am very safe in this assumption. From there, I will prioritize the types of objects and give the highest priority the highest limits.

My main concerns are that we have limited resources, so I do not want to have to redo things too many times. I do not want to go too high, but too low might not be good as well. At least with too low, we can do simple poly dividing (I have ZBrush) to up it if it comes to that. Removing detail seems to be more counter-productive than adding, IMO.

Anyone have any input to add or subtract? All types are welcome. Thanks ahead of time.

#2

WoW uses about 1k triangles per character…so tripling that does not seem unreasonable in 3 years.

#3

Ahh, but WoW gets around that by being cartoonish. That is not a bad thing, but I bet that was a definite plus when deciding how to do their graphics. They can get away with uniform colors for textures. Realism requires MUCH more than 1000 polygons. And as this will be a realistic (ie. not cartoonish) game, that is not gonna cut it.

#4

To be a realistic game, you may reference Half Life 2. However, triangles do not affect fps as much as effect rendering in the scene, especially the lighting effect. So balance your budget.

#5

Several things you can do…
One thing would be to just set a fixed limit now and stick with it. Your resources are limited and you’re wasting time thinking about relatively unimportant stuff. You can get the models done and then get working on incorperating your AI and physics code into OGRE. One thing I’ve noticed about open source, freeware, and indie gamers is that they are very forgiving if the technology is a few years out of style. It’s expected. If the tech was current and the game was good, they’d be looking for a publisher instead…

However, I wouldn’t do that. I’d do something like how Croteam developed Serious Sam. Croteam published many pictures of Serious Sam in it’s development stages from 99 to 01, and if you ever got to play the first tech demo, you’d laugh at how all the models were made out of 500 triangles or less. The texturing was low-quality mspaint-style too. You just can’t make your models all fancy now and then later have your coders tell you something’s wrong or they can’t work with something and they need to be redone. Make your models simple for now, perhaps even simplistically basic, get them to work in-game with simple animations, and work with your animators and coders to know any limitations before you build those high-quality models.

#6

wow character models have 300 polygon

#7

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