Mesh Polygon Count for PC Game

Hi all,

I was wondering what should be my polygon count for FPS weapons and Characters in general. It is for a pc game so I don't mind going a bit high maybe around 4 or 5 k quads for a weapon and around 12 - 15k for a character or is this too high ?

Thanks

 

You DON'T need too go that high. 5000 quads (10000 tris) weapons and 12-15 (24000-30000 tris) characters is extremely high. I think you will have a hard time justifying that for your models even if you get it to perform. I mean where are you gonna use all those polys for the character (I don't know the concept though) weapons are not that big of a deal since its probably not skinned and I close up to the camera all the time.

 

Well the weapons are gonna be straight in your face, it is for a FPS and the characters are somewhat complex, I don't have my concepts with me I'm not at home but here is something similar I guess.



Also I really want to get the most out of the graphics, I will try to optimise the best I can.

 

I guess I could try to poly model my meshes and make good textures with normal maps, I was going to use Zbrush to detail my models.

 

learn the numbers of half life 2 from the net then add about %30-50 to them, there you go...

 

You got to put in a bit more thinking and consideration than that.

 

I find that drawcalls kill my performance much faster than polygon counts.

Also, valve publishes their hardware surveys for everyone to see if you were curious about the average gamer hardware.
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

 

I have the same experience.

Fairly accurate information, but I think most game devs should know that already?

 

The average gamer hardware of those that use Steam and opt-in for the surveys...not the average gamer hardware. If Steam's your market, then it could be very helpful. Though even if Steam's not your market, you may find it helpful.

 

At times even the big companies are oddly out of touch with where the majority of the market might be.

People definitely need to research their intended markets - but a lot of folks just want to make games and overlook that.

 

That's nifty to know. Very nifty to know.

 

Yeah, like Windows still has 98% market share... Damn.

 

Yeah, but 40% of those Windows folks are still XP. 49% of the Win7 folks are only running 32-bit.

Looking around, it becomes clear that the UWP market is very different than the Steam market. I'd say the UWP market would probably offer a fair representation of the Flash/Browser market in general compared to Steam.

General computer/consumer market vs. gamer market. Look through the specs of folks for the UWP - then think about them trying to run some of the recent (barely recent) desktop games. With the way economy has been, not everybody has been able to upgrade their machines over and over (Hell, many did not do it that often previously). Does their machine do what they need it to do? Could it be faster? Sure. Could it offer prettier graphics? Sure. But does it work? Yep.

That market's sitting there waiting to pay out their nickels and dimes - there's enough of them that those nickels and dimes could add up.

So yep, folks need to check out their markets. So given the discussion on polys, what kind of machines is the OP expecting his market to include - will there be enough revenue possible from them to justify the development, etc, etc, etc.

All the best to folks looking to develop for their various markets... I'm looking at my gf's machine and mine which is not that much better, and heh - I know what market I'm playing with...

 

Wasn't aware of this, thanks.
Still heavily skewed because most of it is coming from flash-portal sites though I guess.

Just matters which market you're gearing your game towards I suppose.

 

Here is a screen shot I just took this morning of a project I am working on. This is an LOD script I have designed for unity free. This screen shot contains 10,000 Astroids on the screen at once running near 30 fps. The close LOD is very high poly. So really poly count doesnt really matter much if you have good LOD. This is going on the Asset store soon. Check out the thread. http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/140704-Dynamic-Occlusion-Culling-amp-LOD-For-Unity-Free

 

30 fps on what kind of hardware though?

 

Cyber Power PC. 4 core 3.6 ghz. GTS 450, 8 gigs of ram. Medium end gaming PC. Total cost 700, everything bought from future shop.

 

Heres the web demo. 2400 asteroids.. https://dl.dropbox.com/u/65183439/LOD/WebPlayer.html

And heres the extreme windows version 10,000 asteroids. https://dl.dropbox.com/u/65183439/Extreme LOD.zip

 

Some advice if you really want to allocate your resources for a FPS. Put higher polys only where you see the parts of the gun in first person view, keep the rest low poly, also keep in mind that with animation other parts may become visible you didn't realize.

Guns are very close to the camera so go pretty high poly with them. If it will make a nicer contour, it's worth the investment. Sharp polygonal angles are more apparent the closer they are to the screen.

 

With good LOD, you could even use the full detailed guns you would use in the FPS camera, attached to characters in your scene. Just as long as you only have that detailed mesh showing when close.

 

That would certainly make for smoother workflow. With my suggestion only putting high amounts of polys on the part of the gun you see, I don't know that it would even make that big of a performance boost to be worth the added work.

And, yeah with LOD you can go crazy on the gun's poly count as you should only be rendering one at a time that high.

 

Thanks for all the comments guys sorry it took a while to post I was away for a couple of days, I shall post a weapon screen shot later on today and tell me if I can go higher or if it looks good how it is.

 

how many polygons in 1 asteroid ? i keep searching for the answer to a simple question - how can i stress test my pc for a polycount at chosen fps ?