Hi there! I'm new here, and i have question. For school our group has to develop a carting game (a bit like Mario carting etc..). I'm the 3D artist in the group, and I have to know how many polygons i should use for each cart? We don't want frame drops and stuff like that ;-) I believe it will be played in 3th person view (not sure how close the camera will be). There will be about 2 or 4 carts maximum in a race. The game will run on the Leadwerks engine. What do you guys think? something like 10.000 tri's for each cart? Or maybe more? Or am i completely wrong.. Thanks.

What is your target PC range? I mean, a quad core PC with a 9800GT is going to be able to handle a heck of a lot more than someone with a Pentium 4 and an integrated graphics chipset.

In general though, 10,000 polys is MORE than enough.

well, let's say.. an average PC, not high end. It should run on a nvidia 7900GT (256mb) and an AMD 3800 X2 for example.

So i think i should aim for a polycount between 6000 - 8000 ?

For a mario like carting game, you could use really low poly meshes because the carts are pretty small compared to other things in the world.
Textures do alot - I would try to keep the polycount as low as possible

When I started a project for school (which I didn't finish), I had these models:


334 polys, 64x64 pixel texture


628 polys, 256x256 pixel texture

Ok, this is some sort of cel-shading, but it ran at a few hundred FPS on our school PCs with multiple cars, mounted with miniguns on the screen:

- 2.5GHz, 256mb RAM
- integrated chipset 128mb, DirectX8
- Windows XP

It even used some sort of lightmap for the cel shading look.
I guess a you could keep your carts somewhere in the range of 1000 - 2000 polys without a problem, giving you enough freedom for the player design and the tracks.
Something I also noted is that there is a performance break after a given number of polygons, so it doesn't matter if you send 2 or 200 polygons - but once you send more than 200 polys it will take alot longer and you could send 400 in the same time - So make sure you stay at a value which gives you fast drawing speeds without going landing in the next block.

Good luck and fun with your project =)

hey thanks a lot man! :)
very useful!

nice work btw :p