Originally posted by ShadowPuppet
Writing up a tutorial for FS made me start thinking..... specifically about making sure I was putting down CORRECT advice on modelling approaches in teh light of the improvements to the FS2 engine.
Can someone advice me on the following....
1) Polycounts. I know the overall polycount for ships can be prety massive under FSO, but are there limits on sub-objects et
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sometimes ago it was said that there were a total limit of ~25k TRIANGLES. I also remember someone reporting random crashes with more than 7k x subobject, never got that personally (but it doesn't happen often to put more than 7k polys on a single subobject..)
2) Textures. I know that 'less is more' in terms of performance here. A few large texture maps are more efficient than lots of small ones. Is there a size limit ? Big textures, naturally, cause problems in terms of distribution...but you can't haqve it all 
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the limit is the limit of your graphic card. afaik, if your card doesn't support a size, it'll be scaled down. So if you use a 4096 texture but your card support 2048 max, the texture will be scaled down to 2048. IIRC all the cards that work with FSO support at least 1024, most support 2048, only few support 4096.
As Bob said, the limit should be around 16 textures x ship
3) Model construction. Before, there were certain 'don'ts' around how a model is constructed. The ones around making viable polygons would still be there, since they were not engine-specific, but there were others.
The old engine HATED intersecting polygons. Does the FSO engine allow them ? Saves a lot of bother when addign detail to a hull. You can make blocks that sit on the hull without having to cut holes and weld up the verts etc.
There was also a limit on the number of vertices a polygon could have. Still there?
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You can have intersecting polys almost perfectly rendered.
However, in my opinion a "true" edge look better than a "fake" one generated by the intersections of two faces.
Also, even if intersections are perfectly rendered by the game, there could be problems when converting the mesh, it really doesn't happen often, but sometimes the pof converters get confused by intersections and as result your model is not solid in game (you can fly through..).
In my experience, it may take really a lot to find the offending intersection, since the weirdest intersections you can imagine may work fine when a stupid minor and simple intersection may **** up your whole model, so be extremely careful.
Nonetheless I use intersections, sometimes, since they can reduce a lot the polycount. There are some for example in the HTL Fenris. Just don't use them without discretion, don't put 200 cubes and spheres together calling that a ship, as bob said.
Personally I make my model solid at first, then I work in polyreducing it making intersections and disconnecting submodels.
What does it mean to disconnect submodels?
for example, imagine a cylinder that starts from the base of a bigger cylinder. If you disconnect it you'll have two separated objects, and you'll save many polys deleting hidden faces.
When you convert to pof just glue together the two different objects, and they'll be considered a single subobject. You can do the same to make intersections.
Again, check the Fenris for an example of what I'm saying: open the model in truespace and decompose into objects.
This is a bit tricky, since too many submodels merged in a single subobject may crash the game. I got a model crashing with more than a total 130 submodels and working fine with less, I got another model working fine with more than 180 submodels..as you can see there isn't a true limit and when you start having crashes it could increase a lot the time you spend on the model trying to nail down the prob.
The other modelling limits are the same of the old fs2
