[--Steve-O--]

ok, i've got this model and it is climbing in polies and my concern is climbing too. what i need to know are a few things really.

FIRST! i'll start with rough stats. the main hull by itself is about 15000 polies. toss in turrets with decent detail and it climbs to 40000 polies. now add hangers (which count for nearly half of the poly total and will be subject to the detail box function) and it goes well over the 85000 line.

so what i need to know is, will the conversion programs i.e. PCS 1 or 2 as well as the game engine handle this?
what polies and objects really count against the total poly count, and how does the engine deal with it?
am i pushing the limit here or am i safe and just freaking out? 
even better...what is the functional limit?

the highest poly count i ever hit was about 40000 and i've had no problems so far, and that was done with PCS 1.

[Warp Shadow]

Well pcs2 can handle a lot of polies but that's pushing the envelope. With detail boxes it won't be rendereing everything at a time and if you use LODs correctly it probably wont be as big of a problem in game but I ask you this. Do you really need 85000 polies?! I without a doubt cannot think of a single  instance where I would ever need to use that many. Unless you're trying to recreate the death star I'm sure you could cut that in half with proper optimization and normal mapping. Maybe a little over half actually considering it has a hanger so it must be large.

[Water]

Both FSO and PCS2 will have no problem with that amount of polys.

Where the problem does occur is the target machine. CPU, GPU and RAM.

As for the theoretical limit, I heard about 4 billion verticies at one stage - The functional limit depends on a really nice machine and someone who likes testing limits. 

[--Steve-O--]

i cant think of reason for 85000 polies either! the number was completely unintentional,  and is the prime reason i'm done with that damn triangulate button. i mean yeah it solves a lot of geom errors when they show up, but it is not worth the near quadruple number of faces created in the process. not anymore. i just hate triangulating by hand...so so tedious. as of right now though i'm in the process of trying to cut that number down a bit while dodging the >20 vert per line syndrome. after this im done trying to bring my old models up to spec.

[Bobboau]

it should be mentioned, that when drawn all objects are broken down into triangles.

but more complex polygons do help collision detection and geometry sorting, so your efforts are helping.

[bizzybody]

'Tis better to hand-optimize as you build. When you boolean stuff, check around the cut or join for tiny polies you can eliminate by moving edges or welding verts. Much of the time you can get exactly the same look with much simpler geometry.