I'm developing my first game. Before I acquire a modeling team, I would like to know more about polygons. I want the game's visuals to be of no less than "Halo" quality. How many polygons should we use for a five foot tall character, an eight foot tall character, or an immense arachnid? A tree? A boulder? At what level of smoothness will the gameplay be negatively affected? Is a desert with 3D sand out of the question? [edited by - CharlieM on February 12, 2003 3:25:29 PM]

If this is your first game, you have a lot more important things to spend your time on than how many polygons an object should have. . .

PLEASE WRITE USEFUL RESPONSES ONLY. Don''t worry about the rest of my project and please don''t waste my time.

At a guess, you might allow 3000-5000 poys for a human-type character. That should give you a nice level of detail, comparable to Halo.

You might want to leave it at 2D sand. 3D sand can be a little tricky.

[edited by - NeverSayDie on February 12, 2003 3:58:57 PM]

Thank you.

Actually, acw83''s response was a very wise advice. If it''s your first game, then you shouldn''t even think about trying to code a Halo-clone. There are no general numbers for polycounts, it all depends on how much your engine can handle. So, create a working 3D engine first, and then you''ll automatically see how many faces you can afford per object.

Just to clarify, acw83''s post wasn''t really wise advice. It was a useless declaration that offered no assistance. However, your post is helpful, and I appreciate it. While I''m disinterested in cloning "Halo," I would like to roughly reproduce the game''s visual quality. I have a team of programmers ready to work on the engine, but I would like to know more about the correlation between the engine and the polygons used. This is really just for my own understanding. Thanks.

Would it also depend on how many characters you plan to have on the screen regularly?

3000-5000 polys are good if you are only displaying a few at a time, but a small village full would be very expensive.

[edited by - Waverider on February 12, 2003 6:24:12 PM]

Here is a bit of advice from my own experience with polygons and engines. My engine can push about 300k textured polygons at 30fps on a Geforce4 Ti 4600 (I''ll probably be able to get it up to 400k by the time I''m done). For my engine, models will be from 300-10,000 polygons, depending on the type of model. A rock or tree wouldn''t need very many at all, while a human or very large monster would require 5,000-10,000. You can also improve the quality of the models while keeping down the polygon count by using curved surfaces (NURBS) and elevate them to a higher visual quality using bumpmapping and other such visual effects. A lot of the visual quality of Halo was gained by using such effects as shadows, lighting, detail texturing, etc and not by having models with outrageous polygon counts.

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Realm Games Company

That''s good advice GreatOne...

In fact I''ve read that Bungie plans to use fewer polygons in the character models for the sequel to Halo. By using sophisticated bump-mapping and other effects, etc. they can improve visual quality while dropping the poly numbers at the same time, allowing for better performance and more characters on screen.

So in a nutshell, polygon count can be less important than you may think to visual quality, providing your team takes advantage of some of the techniques that are available.