[TrashMan]

Can you guys give me avarage numbers (polys and textures) you think are appropriate for different ship classes?

I want to give my ships more detail, but want to keep them playable on most systems...

[aldo_14]

IMO

Fighters / bombers; 3000-5000 (latter including cockpit)
Cruisers / Freighter / small non-flyable ships; 3000-6000 (including turrets and destroyed turrets, possibly cockpit / internals for smaller ships)
Destroyers; 5000-8000 (again including turrets)

The turrets thing is sticky.... I have a destroyer with a 3500 poly hull, but the 30 turrets+debris objects makes it 8000 odd.  THe other option, of course, is to really simplify the turrets, but then they can become incongrously simple.

Either way, good LODing keeps things playable.

EDIT; for alien fighters - i.e. ones which are likely to be present in higher numbers in a mission for example - I tend to keep a lower polycount (say 1500-3000) and map size.  It's partly a matter of the purpose, of course - if you;re working on a campaign, you can modulate the polycount budget based on how many of that ship will be onscreen, and how close you'll get to them.

EDIT2; actually, the highest poly fighter I've made was 4000 (with a very detailed cockpit accounting for a lot of those); the 5000 is an absolute max I've yet to come close to breaching.

[StratComm]

Until I get slapped by one of the render engine guys pointing out that I'm mistaken, I'm going to continue to point out that there is some minimum poly-per-texture-per-subobject count below which performance virtually doesn't change.  If you're putting a bunch of 10-poly or less turrets all over your ship, you're probably not saving any performance as opposed to giving each of those turrets a fair number of polygons and increasing the overall polycount of LOD0.  The big no-no is multi-texture subobjects; that's asking for disaster.

[TrashMan]

You mean like texturing a turret with 10 different textures?
I use 2-3 on some bigger turrets, but 1-2 of those are allways used on the ship as well....

So... around 3000 for a cruiser? 4000 for a crovette? 8000 for a destroyer?

Hmm... sometimes the biggest problem I face is what detail to add. Like currently I have a 730 poly corvette (no turrets yet), but I simply have no idea what detail to add on her (except hte engines).

[aldo_14]

Texturing any subobject with >10 (or even >5, I think) textures is iffy; the slowdown, IIRC, comes from the context switch of loading the texture map for the differently textured polygon.  With turrets, you should probably just uv-map them from scratch (or even just simply create a single composite map).

[StratComm]

Precisely.  If you've got more than 1 texture on a turret, you've got too many.  (For the purposes of this argument, barrels count as seperate subobjects, so they can get their own maps if that helps).  But 10 polygons versus 60 or 100 is nothing compared to 1 texture compared to 2.  Welcome to the brave new world of HTL.

[TrashMan]

And making good textures is hard. Finding htme is even harder...

Oh well..off I go to uber - polyinyze this model .....struts...yessss... dents....yes... windows...CHARSH!