[Spoon]

Question
In the wiki there is this written about polygon count:
    Fighters/Bombers - Less than 6000 Polygons
    Cruisers/Freighters - 6000-12000 Polygons
    Corvettes - 14000-18000 Polygons
    Destroyers - 20000-24000 Polygons
    Juggernauts - 24000 Polygons upwards

My fighters so far haven't even hit the 2000 poly mark yet and the biggest ship i've been working on so far (that carrier) has just hit 11,000 polys with turrets included. So I was wondering if including level of detail for ships like this on current day computers will have any kind of noticable positive impact on performance.
Your take on this?

[colecampbell666]

It will show some increase if there are a lot of ships, but for your mid/mid-high end PC from 2-3 years ago you won't notice much issue in a normal (i.e. not BoE) mission.

Other things that have a great effect are UV maps and appropriate texture resolutions and file types. Optimization has a large impact, and detail boxes are good for larger models.

[Scooby_Doo]

A couple of things:

LOD 0 - full
lod 1 - near full (if you have cockpits remove them and black the windows)
lod 2 - crunched by at least 50% if possible, if it's already well compressed then aim for ~700 polys or less. (if it's already very low then skip lod 3)
lod 3 - if necessary, about 100polys (give or take)

use as few textures as possibler.  I'm not sure if the engine is optimized enough yet, but if you have mutliple textures that gets recycled on multiple ships, combine them into one texture.  

Use detail boxes with caution.. they pop in and out.

[General Battuta]

Please LOD 'em. Even if they're already low-poly.

[Spoon]

Please LOD 'em. Even if they're already low-poly.

This may seem like a dumb question but "Why?"
If nobody will notice the difference in performance, why bother?

Other things that have a great effect are UV maps

In what way will UV maps affect performance?

[General Battuta]

Because, first, not everyone has a modern computer, and second, every little bit of performance helps. FSOpen is not a wildly efficient engine, just because of its age.

Sure, the little bit of performance you save by LODing your model might not mean much on its own. But if that model is placed in a really big mission, at a large distance from the player, along with lots of other ships, then it's really helpful if all the ships in the missions have LODs.

Steve-O's Hyperion (the Karuna from BP) doesn't have any LODs, and it makes mission design with it a bit difficult, because a Hyperion really far away is just as taxing as one right next to you.

[Getter Robo G]

Hold up a sec...

Instead of just LODing everything, how about some limit guidelines.

IE: Factors of like 700 polys (nd then multiply) sound good?


something like:
700 or less (not needed)
1400 Lods 0,1
2800 0,1,2
5600 0,1,2,3
ect...

[bobbtmann]

But why would a far away dot on your screen need 700 polys?

[Scooby_Doo]

Also remember going from 700 down to 200 would barely be noticeable on all but ancient hardware.  Textures themselves have more of an effect than the polys.  Also don't forget lods themselves take up memory.

[Spoon]

Also remember going from 700 down to 200 would barely be noticeable on all but ancient hardware.  Textures themselves have more of an effect than the polys.  Also don't forget lods themselves take up memory.

So the issue is, what will affect performance more? The memory usage of the LoD or the polygon usage of the model without lod

[Vasudan Admiral]

Read right through this thread to get a better idea for how to do things right by the FS engine.