Polygons textures lights and engines

[Atheran]

Sorry if it's the wrong section but I didn't know where else to post this as it is not related to DM or DR.

 

Soon as I get back to my desktop I'll start working on a game with two friends of mine. Both of 'em are very good programmers so the whole art/modeling/animating/texturing/level design will be up to me. The rest of the stuff they'll handle. But as it'll be basically a 3d isometric game I won't have much problem covering those fields I think.

 

But I have some questions that I have no idea who to ask for so I thought some coding geniouses here could have an answer or two.

 

From the research I did I found out that nothing is certain. Different engines manage stuff differently so while in DR we try to keep a low polygon count the engine a teacher of mine build with his team for a game handles stuff like 6k polygons per object fine but has a huge impact on fps if they use texture resolutions above 1k. And that is before any beta testing for a wide variety of different configurations that the users computers might have.

 

We're probably going to using Unity for our little project because of three main reasons. Support of fbx and maya extensions/cloud management for the project as we all live far away from the others and because the main programmer knows Unity very well and has worked with it extensivelly in the past..

 

So I guess my main question is...*drumroll*

Is there a rule of the thumb on how to manage the polygon count/texture resolution and/or lights in a level to have some good results? Or is the whole process a trial and error, so I get to start with everything on minimum and build up from there?

[Bikerdude]

I cant answer your question in enough detail, but pne way a mapper can check a scene to see if it will perf well/bad is to use the console command "r_showprimitives 1". This will display the draw call count in the direction the player is looking. In TDM the unofficial recommended DC is 2000, with the D3 vanilla being 1500 and an absolute max per scene of 3000 (including any AI wandering around etc)

[nbohr1more]

As I recall, the free Unity has pretty poor realtime performance compared to the premium edition so if you are struggling it may be partly due to the weight of your wallet.

 

That said, Doom 3 isn't directly comparable to most engines for optimization other than the fact that all engines have a Byzantine collection of performance vs quality trade-offs. Map optimizers love discussing this topic and you should start some dialog with the folks at Mapcore forums since they can give you the low-down on each engine's quirks.

 

Sadly, id tech 5 was desiged to automate map optimization but its tailored for large workstation clusters.

 

The only concrete tip I can offer is that GPU's hate "long thin triangles" and shaders that call textures too many times.