Recommended Polycount

3000? im sure you could easily optimize that down to about 1,500 with little to no noticable decrease in visual quality. A decent representation of a human can be created with as few as 800 triangles, though, I dont know if your characters are human, so that my not apply.

But yeah, 3000 is ok if only a few characters will be on the screen at once.

whats your target hardware level?

Hi,
Currently you can ask for a PS1.x card as an acceptable requirement. Consider the time you will take until your game is finished. Each year a new card generation comes out and a 3 year old tech is an acceptable requirement.

My game is being developed for a PS2.0 card (FX5200 or Radeon 9600). Taking in count we are planning to have it finished next year is an acceptable request.

We use models with an average of 2000 polys. We plan having about 20 in memory and rendering at any time. They will be rendered at about 4 times per frame (for relections, refraction, shadows and glow). But we still get 30FPS in an average frame. Some screenshots. I guess we made a good suggestions and when finished this will require average specs.

So, my advice, when planning your game, plan for the future and consider which cards will be mainstream. Forget current HW.

Luck!
Guimo

I'm don't really have a target hardware. If it runs on my computer then I find all is well. By the way I'm not making humans, that's what makes it so darn difficult [smile]. I have a Geforce FX5500 OC with 256MB, 768 MB in the computer, and a 1.7ghz pentium 4 processor.

for oldish (year 2001 etc) cards u can easily do 10million tris a frame fixed function + 5million with (reasonable shaders) shaders.

devide poly count by fps and it gives u polygons per frame.
FWIW in my game the poly count is practically always above 100,000 a frame

Dont forget you can have multiple Lod's of characters. cause in all seriousness you wont be having that many characters that close to the camera.

This is my computer:
3.6ghz Pentium 4
3 Gigs DDR2 Ram
Geforce 6800 Ultra OverClocked

Using VBO, I can display about 7 humans, modeled at about 80k triangles each with normals (no textures), with no drop in FPS while they are spinning 360s. It all depends on what system you got. What I'm doing for my game is making the main character be VERY high quality, 30k+ triangles, and then making everybody else be fairly low quality. If I have to stare at the character the entire game, he better look dam good. Yeah, it may not run so great on older machines, but I like to progress, build for the present and future, not the past. Obviously don't build to where virutally nobody can play it, but you don't have to make graphics like N64 status.