Poly/texture limit for tablets?

maxivz

Hey guys, i am about to work in a game for mobile devices, specially tablets with my friends on our free time and i was wondering what polycount do you usually use for specific things like props and characters.
Also texture wise, which is the best resolution to go for? Are specular and normals recommended for special meshes like a very important character or something?
Thanks for your help

EarthQuake

Depends heavily on too many factors.

What type of game?
What type of object?
How big is the object?
How close will you get to the object?
What else is on screen?
How much resources are spent on AI, physics, animation, sound, etc?
What hardware? Tablets can vary a great deal
etc
etc
etc

maxivz

Well, we need some kind of guideline for modern tablets, lets say mid to high end,enviornments are not ment to be very detailed, either the ai,physics or animations.
Lets say for example a game with a similar visual quality to dead trigger, which is one of the most popular games in the marketplace so it seems like it runs pritty good in a lot of devices

CowKing

Use top of the line cards in 2006-2008 as a baseline for tablet performance. Honestly, I would say just make the assets how you want them, and then scale back as needed. This is a lot easier for textures than models, but still.

Mirbobo

You can get a sample level of Shadowgun for Unity, which is a 3rd person action game by MadFinger as well, from http://blogs.unity3d.com/2012/03/23/shadowgun-optimizing-for-mobile-sample-level/

It's from 2012 so it might give you some reference, but like EQ said it really depends on what you actually have on screen.

Add3r

Really comes down to the tech you are using, tablet/mobile generations you are aiming for, etc. There are just so many factors that come into play, that you really need to do your own benchmarks. When I was working mobile, we tried to get our hands on as many target devices as we could as not only does the hardware differ between devices, they also handle tech differently. We would find bugs that would only appear on certain gen models, etc.

Just start throwing heavy assets into a scene that spawn on a specific time differential, and watch the polycount soar and have some sort of hud or remote console log to show how many assets are on screen or something. Just so you can get an idea how many tris you are looking at, draw calls, efficiency, mem reports, etc.