biggest things that I found will slow your game down on a low end machine is.
Number of collision polys
Surface count
entity count
number of picks and pickable geometry.
So you need to be very stingy on how many unique brushes you use in your scene, try and avoid overdraw and a lot of alpha.
use invisible hidden collision as much as possible
with static geometry on a low end system its far better to combine all visible geometry that shares the same brush into a single mesh and not worry too much about occlusion.
try and keep pick distances short and I find that using simple geometry invisible collision for gameplay and keeping it completely seperate from the visuals works best.
try and keep your camera ranges as short as possible without having it look crap, same with fog. and Keep dynamic lights under 3 (preferably 1 if possible lol)
these things have worked for us so far and all our games untill the most recent, ran on a Pentium 2 400 32mb Geforce 2 and fly on a athlon 1200 geforce 3.
thats about 50,000 visible polys, up to 4000 invisible colideable polys with sswifts shadow system. a lotwould depend on the type of game your making, but you will be surprised what you can do with fairly few polygons if your artist and coder is experienced at optimizing and knows how blitz works and are both willing to work together at the same goals, making compromizes where neccessary.
Sounds obvious, but its amazing how few people can actually work in an efficient team like environment.
Number of collision polys
Surface count
entity count
number of picks and pickable geometry.
So you need to be very stingy on how many unique brushes you use in your scene, try and avoid overdraw and a lot of alpha.
use invisible hidden collision as much as possible
with static geometry on a low end system its far better to combine all visible geometry that shares the same brush into a single mesh and not worry too much about occlusion.
try and keep pick distances short and I find that using simple geometry invisible collision for gameplay and keeping it completely seperate from the visuals works best.
try and keep your camera ranges as short as possible without having it look crap, same with fog. and Keep dynamic lights under 3 (preferably 1 if possible lol)
these things have worked for us so far and all our games untill the most recent, ran on a Pentium 2 400 32mb Geforce 2 and fly on a athlon 1200 geforce 3.
thats about 50,000 visible polys, up to 4000 invisible colideable polys with sswifts shadow system. a lotwould depend on the type of game your making, but you will be surprised what you can do with fairly few polygons if your artist and coder is experienced at optimizing and knows how blitz works and are both willing to work together at the same goals, making compromizes where neccessary.
Sounds obvious, but its amazing how few people can actually work in an efficient team like environment.