I've demonstrated that this is clearly false. The added wing details will in fact make the model look better on a closeup, and let's face it, people are GOING to go for close-ups! Whether you're talking about polygons or triangles, 300 is what I'd consider an incredibly stingy limit. Just the fact alone that Spring uses non-software rendering increases OTA polygon limits tenfold.Dragon45 wrote:No SW starfighter in a space mod should be mroe than 300 polygons or so
500 ships X 4500 triangles per = 2,250,000 triangles onscreen plus terrain @ 5 FPS w/ no shadows. That's 2 and a quarter million triangles while maintaining five frames per second... so let's say 500,000 triangles to remain playable and pretty, and 100,000 to remain playable, pretty, and with advanced lighting (shadows enabled) and a rig as old as mine.
The above was done prior to model optimization, which may have improved performance by anywhere from 10 to 50 percent.
To then say that 300 triangles on a single unit is going overboard is ridiculous. You could fit 300+ 300-triangles units onscreen at one time without a significant slowdown with all features enabled. I guess that might be OK, but how likely is it that a battle will escalate to that size and remain so for more than a few seconds? I guess it really depends on the sort of battles you're going for. If you want senseless numbers of units being randomly thrown at each other with no thought involved, better keep it as low as possible. If you want strategic thinking, I highly doubt that more than 100 ships will ever be onscreen at one time, even during the largest battles.
above is 100 x 4500 triangles = 450,000, advanced lighting off. Until advanced lighting code is improved, I think that 30 FPS in an above situation with it enabled is an unrealistic thing to aim for on mainstream setups.