Just how much data is too much for modern computers to handle at one time? I''m trying to prevent lag but still want to have many different 3d models on the screen as possable. This is beacause sometimes in table-top RPGs, you get to control an army or fight alongside one. It would be cool to see the front lines taking a beating! Maybe from 1POV you can see only a few and the rest are truncated from the scene while the war audio rages on. Just how many polygons per character can I have to have a battle like the opening level of MOH without losing framerate?

It depends on the system, the engine and videocard. So this is something that you need to put in your question for you to get a decent answer.

Yeah, on moderm day hardware, it would be easy enough to have a battle field consisting of over 1,000 low polygon models (500-1000 triangles I''d hazard to guess) using vertex hardware shaders (for animation). You figure, 1,000 * 500 = 500,000, and after back-face culling, and occlussion culling, that number decreases dramatically (say it cuts it in 1/2, which isn''t unheard of for back-face culling alone, so 250k). A modern day graphics card can easily push over 10,000,000 polygons per second, so even with 1,000 models on screen, that''s still only 250,000, which is a mere 2.5% of the 10 million "limit". I mean, even my lowly gf2 ddr can push 10 million polys per second, so higher end hardware (gf2, gf4, gf fx, radeon 8500, 9x00, etc) all have much higher throughputs. If you have a relatively simple scene, and the CPU is fast enough to deal with the AI involved in such a scene, you could easily have 10,000 people on field .

So the cpu handles the AI while the graphics card handles the polygons? What about the RAM? Is there anything that it does to help the CPU?(I need to know my restrictions.) Lets say you had AI as dynamic as Splinter Cell's for each character, how much ram and minimum proccessing power would be needed to support it? I'm at least trying to keep a FPS of 50-60 and add as much detail to each model variation as possable. Oh crap, that won't be possable with today's cards because you may have all these people on the screen, but the refresh rate will be so slow that it won't be worth playing. Wait, NM you said that 2.5% of the graphics will be to pull up the polygons the rest will be towards the frame-rate.

[edited by - smiley4 on April 2, 2003 11:54:36 AM]

Ack! I'm getting down to 30-something FPS to be just under the limit! I want to see explosions off in the front lines, cannons being fired from the enemy, bodies flying from the hit, smoke comming out of caters, massive body count, and mounted calvary chopping off infantry heads. I want this to be so grusome that you have respect for the odds you're up against. I want it to play out like Gettysburg! Perhaps I could create a rule set for the battlefield's random character generation to cut down the lag and up the polycount on a few models. There would have to be a colision detection setting for certain models; and some of the models (like the ones being decapitated) would have to be, in fact, 2 models that are parented to each other with an IF THEN statement that seperates the two.
Wpheew! I got a lot of work ahead of me!

[edited by - smiley4 on April 2, 2003 12:20:48 PM]