Yeah true, but this depends much on what kind of game you're making so let me explain my story , I am working on a simple ios game , its a board game so I didn't need a big environment, for now I have this in my game:
-sky dome mesh 500 tris with 2048x2048 texture and a copy of it scaled to -1 on z-axis , to mimic reflection of the sky, I made the skydome quite big actually so you can fly arround if you want to!
-1 large plane brush for water surface, using tileable transparent water texture 1024x1024
-2 types of birds in the sky using particle systems and a 256x256 texture
- a skeletal mesh for a game pawn 1800 tris(extending from UDKPawn class) , in game I then have 14 - 25 of these pawns on screen, depending on the game difficulty! Each time you play they all get randomly assigned 5 different materials with 512x512 textures(diffuse, emissive,normal ) , and each material is using mobile specular too!
- other environment meshes with about 15k tris total all merged into about 3 meshes each having materials with 512x512 textures!
- a few more particle systems with 256x256 textures
- and also several other small textures 128x128,256x256 for the buttons and text displays in game etc
- and I only have 1 sky light in the map!
thats about it!
I plan to include a lot more environment static meshes later on with updates and also make more environments , maps, etc,
but so far I'm keeping it simple as making a game from start to end is a big long process!
So now about performance, I am testing this game with my ipod touch 4!
When theres 14 pawns (11200 skel tris), the game runs perfectly smooth!
When adding more pawns I noticed first slowdowns when I go above 20 pawns(36000 skel tris),
however at that time it is still totaly smooth, only on hard mode in my game there can be up to 25 pawns (45000 skel tris)as maximum ,
at that number the slowdown is obvious to a game developer, however I think it is still running withing the normal rates to play the game,
and all newer devices should eat this game for breakfast anyway, however I will continue to try to optimize the game and add more stuff!
So thats about it, I hope this info helps! Now I must get back to work, I am actually in finishing stages, just working out the details, bugs, improving buttons graphics and achievements pics , adding sounds,custom font, etc.. soon it will be ready to release
That was back from 2011 so who knows how much more powerful phones have gotten.
Hmm, it's like a temple run type game, will 5k do?
I was the animator for Temple Run 2. The characters were 900 triangles with 24 bones each. The entire environment was extremely low poly and only used one 1024 texture atlas. We had such tight restraints to get the game to run on underpowered Android devices. It was a good thing too, we had 50 million downloads in the first few weeks, and most of those we're on older hardware.
I'd say 3k tops if you view the character from close without a lot of enviro clutter, also depends on what kind of shaders and texture specs you're running. But even 3k is pushing it a lot and assuming there's very few onscreen characters. Optimization is hugely important on mobile, you'll want to cut down every poly that doesn't contribute to essential silhouette.
Replies
We had characters that were 5k max, with maybe up to 10 on screen at once, but these were also very heavily lod'ed.
https://forums.epicgames.com/threads/844646-poly-count-for-a-character-for-ios
That was back from 2011 so who knows how much more powerful phones have gotten.
I was the animator for Temple Run 2. The characters were 900 triangles with 24 bones each. The entire environment was extremely low poly and only used one 1024 texture atlas. We had such tight restraints to get the game to run on underpowered Android devices. It was a good thing too, we had 50 million downloads in the first few weeks, and most of those we're on older hardware.