I was wondering how many models a game like GTA III San Andreas has. Does anyone know? Like, how many building, persons, cars, etc. Know this will be important to predict game art of this quality effort. Thanks, Pedro

Do you need to know how many specific meshes the game has, or models? Because an easy shortcut in any 3d game is building one mesh that can utilize multiple skins, thereby making it a different "model" so to speak.

But if you want the raw numbers so as to know how many you'll need to create, that's based on your design doc. You'll need:

1 unique model for every unique character (player character, important NPC, etc)
1 unique model for every car body type (if you're making a game similar to GTA3)
1 unique model for every ambience piece (lightpost, trash can, rock, tree, litter, and so on)
1 for every weapon (you can possibly cheat and make several varied skins for a generic weapon mesh)
1 for every unique building type, if the buildings even count as their own model, and not some kind of .bsp-based structure...

...and I'm sure I'm missing categories here.

I'd wager it's easily in the hundreds (200-400), not to mention all the textures you'll need to make to create the feeling of a varied environment.

San Andreas had a few thousand models at least.

GTA3 probably had around a thousand.

These are completely fudged and numbers I've arrived at given about 15 seconds thought. Please don't argue with them...

I believe PIX can show this sort of information

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb173085.aspx

PIX only shows you statistics for games that were built with debug information built into the executable, to my knowledge.

Most commercial games optimize their released builds as to exclude this information, and just from playing around with it, some non-debug builds I've tried will actually crash when you try to run an experiment with PIX.

If you really want to know exactly how many models GTA3 has ( can't imagine why ), get your hands on the PC version and see if you read their asset files ( they are most likely packed together as a CAB or PAK ). I would think they would use one packed file for all their meshes, so good luck with that.

hi pisrael;

it depends on the game in question actually, for GTA III SA I'd say more than a thousand meshes. that doesn't mean every character is animated seperately tho do not get scared yet:) most games use shared animations for npcs, like in counter strike, all players actualy use one shared .smd file for animations. Since they are using the same rig that's saving a LOT of time there:)

If you have half life 2 you can install GCFScape to view the models used in the game and decompile them (for mods or other legal things of course).

In my current project we have over 28GB of source artwork data. Of course, it isn't just the 3D models, it is also the textures, animations, world descriptions, and so on.

I'm still amazed that the tool chain manages to get it down to 4GB of data.