Plash:
I just went into the program, and checked to see if the table casting shadows had any impact on performance, but when I disabled shadows on the table, there was no visible change to frame rate.
I could probably lightmap the table, but the board itself would be too hard, as terrain can be changed or removed during the game depending on what the players do, (ie, building turn to rubble) so scenery casted shadows could change during gameplay.
It gets great framerate on my current computer, about half on my older computer, and pretty low on my laptop, when shadows are turned on.
My current computer is an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400, 4GB Ram, and a Geforce 9800 GT graphics card. It gets 60 to 75 fps on average.
My older computer is an AMD Athlon 64 3500+ with only 2GB Ram and a Geforce 7800 GTX. It gets 20 to 35 fps on average, depending on how much is placed on the board. Since it's not an animated action game, if it drops to 20, it's still completely playable on that computer.
My laptop though, has Intel Core2 Duo T5750 2Ghz, with onboard X3100 GMA graphics, and only 2GB of RAM, and only manages 9 to 25 fps depending on how much is on the board, though sometimes it gets glitchy. When it drops to 9 fps, the whole thing stutters.
Of course, turning off shadows completely alters fps, the laptop goes over 60 fps with shadows off, so that is an option for laptop users that don't have dedicated graphics, or userd on older computers who would rather have 60+ framerates than lighting/shadow effects.
I don't actually have any idea what the average spec computer would be nowadays though.
I just went into the program, and checked to see if the table casting shadows had any impact on performance, but when I disabled shadows on the table, there was no visible change to frame rate.
I could probably lightmap the table, but the board itself would be too hard, as terrain can be changed or removed during the game depending on what the players do, (ie, building turn to rubble) so scenery casted shadows could change during gameplay.
It gets great framerate on my current computer, about half on my older computer, and pretty low on my laptop, when shadows are turned on.
My current computer is an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400, 4GB Ram, and a Geforce 9800 GT graphics card. It gets 60 to 75 fps on average.
My older computer is an AMD Athlon 64 3500+ with only 2GB Ram and a Geforce 7800 GTX. It gets 20 to 35 fps on average, depending on how much is placed on the board. Since it's not an animated action game, if it drops to 20, it's still completely playable on that computer.
My laptop though, has Intel Core2 Duo T5750 2Ghz, with onboard X3100 GMA graphics, and only 2GB of RAM, and only manages 9 to 25 fps depending on how much is on the board, though sometimes it gets glitchy. When it drops to 9 fps, the whole thing stutters.
Of course, turning off shadows completely alters fps, the laptop goes over 60 fps with shadows off, so that is an option for laptop users that don't have dedicated graphics, or userd on older computers who would rather have 60+ framerates than lighting/shadow effects.
I don't actually have any idea what the average spec computer would be nowadays though.