gotelin,
Everything that Rob said is very important, you must get as much out of your system evey inch of the way, if you don't need or see the polys - loose them - dont leave them hidden.
Looking forward - or planning as I prefer to call that phase, is the MOST IMPORTANT PART OF YOUR DESIGN. You must try to take into account every aspect you can, so you won't meet anything undesirable when you build and programme your projects.
Have contingencies too - if I can't do it this way or have this many characters of this number of polygons have a Plan B which is easy to implement. With animated characters this may be before you add detail - save characters out and keep them separately from the more complex detail you add. You can then go back instead of starting from scratch. Also be frugle with your bones. Don't use them if you don't need them.
You must also accept a level beyond which you will not develop - or the project will never get finished - so set the ground rules and follow them stringently.
We have a simulator which has upwards of 850 vehicles running with AI and user input via steering wheel - the vehicles travel along a motorway and interact with you - the user. The motorway is vast about 130,000 z pixel depth - all loaded at once and all textured and with animations. Plus a rear view mirror camera.
I can tell you that including cars and scenery running on an Athlon 2.4 with 1GB RAM and a 64MB GeForce 4 - I have managed to push in excess of 145,000 polygons with a 30 fps frame rate.
The best advice I can give is keep your surfaces down to a minimum. If you have any vehicles try to use as few textures as possible for each vehicle, ie one texture for bodywork and one for glass is enough. This would be the same for animating characters, keep your surfaces down to a minimum and bones too.
In our driving sim, we had 30 different type of vehicles all running at once - originally each had 20 surfaces for bodywork textures etc. I managed 13 different vehicles on screen before the system clogged up.
So we made all the vehicles into 2 surfaces one for glass one for body and then we could manage all 30 vehicles at once. It crawls on lower end machines, but as it was built for the PC I mention above - it runs fine on the finished sim.
IPete2.
Everything that Rob said is very important, you must get as much out of your system evey inch of the way, if you don't need or see the polys - loose them - dont leave them hidden.
Looking forward - or planning as I prefer to call that phase, is the MOST IMPORTANT PART OF YOUR DESIGN. You must try to take into account every aspect you can, so you won't meet anything undesirable when you build and programme your projects.
Have contingencies too - if I can't do it this way or have this many characters of this number of polygons have a Plan B which is easy to implement. With animated characters this may be before you add detail - save characters out and keep them separately from the more complex detail you add. You can then go back instead of starting from scratch. Also be frugle with your bones. Don't use them if you don't need them.
You must also accept a level beyond which you will not develop - or the project will never get finished - so set the ground rules and follow them stringently.
We have a simulator which has upwards of 850 vehicles running with AI and user input via steering wheel - the vehicles travel along a motorway and interact with you - the user. The motorway is vast about 130,000 z pixel depth - all loaded at once and all textured and with animations. Plus a rear view mirror camera.
I can tell you that including cars and scenery running on an Athlon 2.4 with 1GB RAM and a 64MB GeForce 4 - I have managed to push in excess of 145,000 polygons with a 30 fps frame rate.
The best advice I can give is keep your surfaces down to a minimum. If you have any vehicles try to use as few textures as possible for each vehicle, ie one texture for bodywork and one for glass is enough. This would be the same for animating characters, keep your surfaces down to a minimum and bones too.
In our driving sim, we had 30 different type of vehicles all running at once - originally each had 20 surfaces for bodywork textures etc. I managed 13 different vehicles on screen before the system clogged up.
So we made all the vehicles into 2 surfaces one for glass one for body and then we could manage all 30 vehicles at once. It crawls on lower end machines, but as it was built for the PC I mention above - it runs fine on the finished sim.
IPete2.