Irrlicht Engine

Hi all, I have a couple of graphics question:

Using Irrlicht and normal PC(p4 2~3Ghz, Graphics Card:256~512Mb), to develop a game;

1- Max number of polygon to render a character

2- Max number of polygon to render a map (city,ecc...)

3- It's better draw a map with:
All object in a single file (.3ds,.obj,other), or more files like: terrain+houses+street object+......

Thanks

Absolute numbers won't really work because they depend on many many different factors. That said and just to give you some start numbers, I will tell you some numbers which might or might not work for some games:

5000 polygons for a character
50000 polygons for a map

Having nothing to special (usual textures, not too many lights, no unusual polygons) those numbers could work on most machines with an acceptable framerate. At least unless you have lots of characters.

But really - don't trust me. You can use those numbers for a start until you did own tests - and afterwards you will throw 'em away and replace them with own numbers. Which will probably be completely different!

Using less objects is somewhat faster, but usually impractical, because as soon as you have several maps you will most likely reuse some objects. Which certainly only works if you have them separate from the map.

By the way, always do a release build of your app (and Irrlicht) before worrying about performance. There can be a significant difference.

what do you mean "(and irrlicht") ?

I mean using Irrlicht last release 1.4.

Resume:

Hardware: normal PC (P4 2~3Ghz) with Graphics card 256-512Mb ,RAM 1Gb
Game engine:Irrlicht 1.4

Soft:

Programming: DevC++ on OS:WinXP
graphic: 3ds Max 9

I think that CuteAlien has answered good..

but if Can I ask another question:
What do you mean usual polygons ??

Usual texture OK (Diffuse),.... but polygons ??


thx all

He probably means usual polygons are triangles. Some models can have polygons with more sides than 3, such as quads or even bigger.

I guess irrlicht probably supports these more-sided-polygons but they're not as efficient to render as triangles i believe.

I thought about anything unusual. Unusual is mostly slow. For example with drawing a few large polygons with transparency you can get the framerate down very fast. We had that problem often when doing particle effects. And there are probably *lots* of other situations which can affect the framerate. Adding lights will certainly drop the framerate, you have different framerates depending on the texturefilter, Antialiasing can kill framerate on some cards, adding shadows can completely kill it, etc.

m4tricol wrote: 1- Max number of polygon to render a character
2- Max number of polygon to render a map (city,ecc...)

Depends on type of the game (MMORPG,FPS,RTS,Logic).
Depends on minimal requirements you will recommend.
new (1 year) GeForce8800GTX ~ 200-300k per frame (!);
middle (2-3 years) GeForce6600GT able to handle about 100k trigs/frame;
old (6-7 years) Radeon9200 able to handle 20-40k triangles per frame;
-- With FPS>40
-- It doesn't mean that you must not use more than 20-40k trigs per level of course.

m4tricol wrote: 3- It's better draw a map with:
All object in a single file (.3ds,.obj,other), or more files like: terrain+houses+street object+......

It is better to draw separately, because you can reuse objects in other scenes. But it is more complex. Using all level as a single mesh much easier if you want to render real static shadows into textures.

I've heard that new stuff (read: 8800, etc.) can brute a few million tri's a frame... :/

FlyingIsFun1217

I wouldn't try that with Irrlicht until we have hardware VBO support.

rogerborg wrote:I wouldn't try that with Irrlicht until we have hardware VBO support.

I'll definitely grant you that one!

When are we getting that by the way?

FlyingIsFun1217

It's already in for ... 6 weeks, or around that number. But it's OpenGL only for the moment. Basically because no one really wants to bother with Direct3D. It's just implementing a few methods, but seems that there's no win32 specific development at the moment.

hybrid wrote:It's already in for ... 6 weeks, or around that number.

I see. The only reason I don't really know is that I don't really do much with Irrlicht any more, so I'm not as inclined to check out SVN and stuff.

Can't wait to see what kind of performance increases people see in 1.5

FlyingIsFun1217