Spring RTS Engine

Which do you think is better?

PS: Modelled is when you have the cylinders down there, textured is where your treads are a flat surface and you merely paint the wheels on.

How's about "either, depending on size of the unit and polycount considerations". I have units that have modeled bogies that turn... and units where I don't, because it'd be pointless eye-candy except in super-up-close movies and I don't think players will mind very much if I skip it.

what Argh said. it depends on the unit size. on a weasel you won't bother.
I think you need a unit of greater then tier 3 units to actually start bother about such small details.

Put a plate there to cover the wheels up...

As Argh said; and from there I'll have different poly wheels depending on how big they are, and how numerous they are. If it's a huge thing and wheels are the focus (say, a Hailfire Droid, then my wheels will be large complicated affairs. Very different compared to the cogs in tank treads, which may get 5 or even 4 polies (assuming I haven't just textured them on because they are so small).

Modelled wheels look 5000 times better. The load on performance is negligable. If you can make a good texture and model wisely there's barely any difference... barely! ie instead of having 16 different wheels, combine two wheels that are on opposite sides, so that they are infact one wheel. They turn at the same time so why the fuck not?

SpikedHelmet wrote:Modelled wheels look 5000 times better. The load on performance is negligable. If you can make a good texture and model wisely there's barely any difference... barely! ie instead of having 16 different wheels, combine two wheels that are on opposite sides, so that they are infact one wheel. They turn at the same time so why the fuck not?

I wonder if using such tricks actually pays off, considering that performance might be influenced by other factors such as polygon size (how many pixels to fill in the polygon) and other stuff like clipping.

For tank wheels I'd just model the tracks as a block with no wheels and add polygons that have wheels painted on them (using alpha) on the sides of that block to do the rotating.