Reasonable poly count and other metrics

[JonPatch]

Folks, I'm just about finished a scenery design, and prior to going to beta testing wanted an idea of what would be a reasonable poly count. The frame rate hit on my older machine (1.7GHz, 768Mb, Ti 4200 128Mb) is reasonable, and I will ask others with lesser and better machines to test. But in addition to that is the following poly count reasonable? What other metrics should I use? Total texture size is 5mb, with another almost 5mb for night textures.

Boats: 852
Buildings: 4869 (almost half of which is one building)
Fences: 11074 (mostly greatly simplified version of Marci's fence, poly count is 1/5 of hers)
Light poles: 15394 (there's lots of them!)
Marine lights: 6260 (lots of them too!)
Misc objects: 2990
Vehicles: 2648
===========
Total: 44087

I use a number of generic MS objects as well, but that won't increase the poly count much.

Thoughts appreciated before I finalize, thanks.

Jon

 

[JeffS]

Jon, the only thing i can think of regarding objects, if you allready havnt, make sure you use a Lib called object for common objects as they will help with FPS as your only loading 1 object into memory yet placing it several times. For the Object, keep the poly count as low as practical and rely on textures to define detail. FPS from 15-25 should be more than sufficient as they human eye cant really see any diff and wont detect anything over about 27 FPS so there isnt any benfit forcing a higher FPS and the unused Video resources would be better loading and drawing things like textures.
Most webcams and video cams only capture at a max of 30 FPS !

Regarding textures, the larger the texture file ( 1024*1024 ) the more space itll take up in memory so keep an eye on texture sizes, use a large texture file as much as you can for as many objects as possible ! DXT textures tend to take up less space but can suffer from image degradation so its a fine balance !

Hope this has been of some help.

rgds Jeff

 

[JonPatch]

Hi Jeff,

I wasn't aware of the lib object structure, thanks for the tip! Where can I learn more about this?

My frame rates tend to be lower as I have an older machine; the scenery only causes a 2 fps drop which seems insignificant. I'll have beta testers try it on a variety of machines.

I'm pretty happy with my optimization of texture sizes, and I've got almost all .BMP and only 2 small DXT3s. I've worked hard to minimize poly count and am happy with that as well, except for 1 building (2400 polygons). It was a bit time consuming, so I'm not sure I want to spend the time to rework it.

Thanks for the response, Jeff.

Jon

 

[JeffS]

Hi Jon
If your using scasm i did a short tutorial at www.scenery.org for lib objects and thier creation but if your using XML ( preffered for FS9 ) then look no further than Arno's excellent Library_Creator if you have a collection of your own custom made Gmax objects. For FS9 Default objects ( not locked to an area ) you can just place them by standard XML code.

All RWY12 objects that you DL from the various places like avsim and flightsim are actually Library Files that can be placed by the GUID's by hand if you prefer, or, by RWY12.

RWY12 is a GUI program that places Lib objects for you the same way FSSC places API Macros ( scasm based ). An API macro can be either a dedicated object or a Macro that calls a Library Object by its GUID code.

I have created a scenery that used 700+ Macro Calls of custom Library Objects made with FSDS and suffered a 1.5 average FPS rate when locked at 30 FPS but there is a limit to Library placed objects before you start to hit a degredation, this limit can only be found by trial and error due to the complexity of the objects. One way to increase the total object placement , is where possible, remove the shadow call when its not really needed as this also is an FPS killer. Removal of the Shadow needs to be done by hand and Arno is better qualified to advise you on this for both scasm and gamx objects.

rgds Jeff

 

[JonPatch]

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for the help, I appreciate it.

I'm using XML, and downloaded Arno's library creator, thanks for the tip. It won't generate BGLs without error (yes I have bglcomp everywhere!), but the XML would compile if I used the command prompt. It would not compile if I dragged the XML file on top of BGLCOMP as I usually do. Weird.

I'm missing something here though. What happens to the XML code files I have now that provide the additional info on object locations, effects, etc? Do I simply remove the model references from them?

In general I combine lots of objects into each XML file. Eg all buildings are in one, all lights in another, etc. So I only have a few resulting BGL files. Is library creator going to have a benefit in such case?

I haven't used killshadow on all my objects, but I probably should on the many smaller objects before I release.

Jon

 

[Georg Aubele]

Gotta something to add: SGX can now (build 33) even place API-files

Edit: I don't get it, because I read different things about RW12 libraries ...
Can I place objects within those libraries with SGX or XML or do I have to change something?
I avoided to download RW12-files until now, because I thought they would be no use to me with SGX ...

 

[arno]

Hi Jon,

I'm using XML, and downloaded Arno's library creator, thanks for the tip. It won't generate BGLs without error (yes I have bglcomp everywhere!), but the XML would compile if I used the command prompt. It would not compile if I dragged the XML file on top of BGLCOMP as I usually do. Weird.

You should be able to compile with the compile button in Library Creator XML itself. BGLComp is a bit touchy with XML files that use full paths in the filenames.

I'm missing something here though. What happens to the XML code files I have now that provide the additional info on object locations, effects, etc? Do I simply remove the model references from them?

If you are using a library then you will have one file with only placements and the other with only the objects. But when using the XML code you can also combine the code into one BGL if you want (if you don't want to use the objects elsewhere as well, then it makes no difference). And even then the objects are "library objects", just because the XML code does not support other objects. So for the framerate it should not matter that much.

 

[arno]

Gotta something to add: SGX can now (build 33) even place API-files

Man, that is bad news. People should start to learn that API macros are becoming obsolete and should be used as little as possible in full Fs2004-style scenery.

Edit: I don't get it, because I read different things about RW12 libraries ...
Can I place objects within those libraries with SGX or XML or do I have to change something?
I avoided to download RW12-files until now, because I thought they would be no use to me with SGX ...

They are Fs2004 style object libraries, so you can just place them with a piece of XML code (or SGX). Rwy12 does create placement XML code as well.