FPS polycounts

Dante1217

what would you say is a reasonable amount of polys for a Gun in an FPS game? is 1500 too much? because the highest one (for low poly game modeling) that i have made is 1538, and the lowest is 682.. what do you guys think? remember this is not going to be run on a hi-end engine, but will be for a free FPS game that is DX9 and downloadable to the public.

thanks ahead of time :]

Jesse Moody

depends on game, gun design, style, etc.

I have seen guns range from 800-18000 tris so it really all depends and is a case by case basis.

MoP

1500 sounds fine, but it really depends on your engine and how well it can cope with drawing lots of polygons. You could probably go up to 5000-10000 on current hardware if your engine is good, without any trouble. Obviously lower is better, but certainly you should be thinking in the range of thousands rather than hundreds. Don't waste polys, but use as much as is sensible to make your weapons look good.

Kawe

I'm still wondering why there isn't a sticky about poly counts on this forum.. I mean. Is this polycount or not?

Justin Meisse

Could we also have a sticky for how long a piece of string is?

Dante1217

Justin_Meisse wrote: »

Could we also have a sticky for how long a piece of string is?

BRILLIANT!

also, thanks for the ideas guys =]

EarthQuake

I think for UT3 the weapons were in the 10-14,000 tris range for the highest LOD

On darkest of days, the assets i did were mostly in the 3-6,000 range, depending on complexity of course.

1500 wouldn't be too much by anyone's standards these days, in most cases this wouldn't be enough.

Dante1217

oh.. well in that case... lol alright.. the only thing is that this is gonna be for a free game, and eatch match will have 4-24 players.. but on that note, it really isnt something to be worrying about.

@earthquake Sucessfull thread =P

Richard Kain

The more technical details you can provide, the better ballpark figures the members here can throw at you. Telling us the expected player count range is a good start. 4 - 24 players is nothing to sniff at in an on-line fps shooter. You don't want too high of a polycount if you are expecting to have a lot of players.

Probably the most important detail you should be providing is the engine. If you are using an existing engine, or a modified version of an existing engine, this will tell us a lot about what kind of technical specifications you are going to be looking at. If you are using Unreal Engine 3, that has pretty steep hardware requirements, so you are going to need to scale back the polycount. A game engine that uses fewer shaders or is known for performing faster with higher polycounts can probalby handle more complex models for your weapons. You are a little vague on the engine.

But perhaps most importantly is the fact that you don't specify whether these are view models, or in-game models. In a typical FPS, the view-model for a gun is what you see in your first-person view. These models are not actually displayed to the other players in the game, only you can see them. As such, these models can afford to have higher polycounts, as the engine never has to render more than one at a time on each machine. A gun model that everyone can view in the game during play will need to have a lower polycount, as there could easily be 23 of them being rendered simultaneously.

As just a general estimation, I would say that 600 - 1500 polys is a pretty good number for an in-game gun model. For view models, I would say go closer to 3000, especially if the design of the gun warrants it. If the system specs of the engine aren't that beefy, (and it sounds like they aren't) you should easily be able to handle counts like that.

Dr Stench

The gun in first person sight can be very hi poly of course. The main gun of killzone 2 will be about 20k.