Hi,
Just finished my main character and I have a 16k polys. Is that too much for a flash / away3d? I have loaded obj with some terrain and other 3d objects (around 70k poly) and it was fine. Still around 50 fps. But when I loaded my character with md5mesh and md5anim fps get down to around 10. It was just a quick test, any my character is right now bad rigged and animated. Probably that is the reason for such a low fps. Before I go any further with that. Is that 16k is too much for my main model?

Well it all depends on the kind of game you’re developping, but in any case 16K is an awful lot

If you create a web game, keep in mind you want your game to run nice and smooth on as many systems as possible.

Even for a “street fighter 4” type of game (only 2 characters moving) I would probably not consider going above 5-6K polys per character unless it’s very specific (like an event where you know the specs of the system that will run the game).

Thanks for a reply. I made a mistake during my modelling. I saw 8k faces but that gives me 16k poly :{ I don’t really want to make it from beginning.
By the way.
It’s just a project for learning flash 3d purposes. But it’s a turn based rpg kind of game.
http://www.truesign.ie/burrenTerrain/
I won’t have enough time to make entire game just by myself. As you can see in the link 70k for the whole scene and it’s working fine (at least at my computer).

Looks nice, however Matse is right. That’s awfully lot of polys for a character. For your type of game I would recommend 4-6k polys. Even for a desktop based game 16k is a lot. With a good normal map you can make a 3-4k poly model that will be almost same quality. And its not just the rendering… When you make a web based app you seriously have to take in to account the file size. Even if your product renders smoothly at the end you will end up with 100mb+ product that needs to be downloaded every time the player wants to enter the game. If you are going for web based game you will have to pack everything in 5-10mb. So if you plan to have a bigger variety of equipment and enemies those recommended 4-6k polys will drop to recommended no more than 1k.

PS.Look at the attachment. My 746 poly model with 128x128 texture. Not as good looking as yours but 21 of my models have same poly count as your one. If I double the poly count it will reach the quality of yours. I know its a pain in the ass but you will definitely have to remodel your character. I know how it is, I’ve made mine several times until I’ve reached my desired polycount ;)

Thanks for reply.
Your are right. My first model for this game was 1400poly. But I had a problem with UV so I decided to start all over again with base man mash in Mudbox. Right now I know it was mistake.
By the way: do you know how many polys have a main characters in modern games for PC, like for example Final fantasy or Witcher ect…? I’m just curious.

It really depends on the type of game, or to be more precise, how much characters will there be on the scene.
For example strategy games have lots of units so they range from 500-1000. MMORPG can have many units also but less than strategy games so they range 2k-6k. Some newer games with not much characters in one place (FPS for example) go above that.
*when I say units I mean units with their equipment too.

The general rule is the quality you aim for with the lowest poly count you can make. The quality really comes more from the textures than the poly count.

Totally agree with inSertCodE, also you shouldn’t aim for numbers from AAA games : either those games run on consoles and are optimized for that specific hardware, or they are aimed at game-level PCs.

The higher you push your numbers, the less people can play your game on their computer. Also filesize will grow up very fast. I think it’s smarter to look at games like World of Warcraft for example : I don’t play nor like this game, but they did an incredible job at pushing visual quality at the lowest cost

Also a technical tip for a change : not 100% sure but I think you use the opponents meshes directly for mouse detection ? This has a cost, as if I’m not mistaken mouse enabled meshes will be rendered twice : once for mouse detection, then for the final render.
It might not be enormous, I didn’t do any benchmark yet, but it counts for sure. A better way to handle mouse detection in my opinion is to use a very low resolution mesh if you really need detection to meet the shape of the mesh, or (even better for performance) a simple box (or another primitive).

I think in your case the box would work : it will make clicking an opponent easier. Juste create a box primitive, add a ColorMaterial to it with alpha set to 0, then clone it for every opponent : scale it to match its bounding box, add it as a child of the opponent’s mesh and just add your listeners on the box.

The box won’t be visible, but will still work for mouse detection

Thank you for advice. I made that dull cube primitives for a better performance - not sure you can fell the difference now, but i’m sure its a good habit to make simple primitive to register your mouseEvent. I didn’t know that. Thanks

I don’t aim for any game now to be honest. I’m playing around with flash and away3d. I wondered how much I can push poly/quality meshed to be displayed in a browser. I don’t mind the file size as well. At least on this stage. This is just a part of a learning process away3d. And probably I will and up with simple battle scene like that. I don’t have enough time to make models, textures, programming as3 code just by myself.

By the way: in my previous version that I left, I used Master not dev version of away3d. I made a spirite3d for and enemies info with textures from movieclip from swc library. How can I do that in a new dev version? ( http://www.truesign.ie/3dproject/ - old version)