Poly count limit or recommendation?

  • How much do polygons eat up performance in Aerofly FS2? When I ask about polys I mean what is a limit for say a hangar, 1000, 10,000, 100 polys? Reason I ask is because I would feel really stupid creating buildings that cant even run in the simulator or getting 10fps when it would rather be 60fps because of double the polys.

    I am not sure how anyone would answer this though, basically 10 years ago 10,000 polys for a game character was cutting edge, now it is millions, what about flight sim? Or is this mostly to do with hardware? All I know is that I need to try to work with the least amount I can but who knows what that actually is...

    Here is a building I am working on:

    The building when I am done will have around 300 polys. From looking at many Orbx airports I can guess they have close to the same or less on their buildings. Basically if I have 20 buildings with 500 polys how much of a performance hit would there be if any?

  • I'm not able to give you any quantified answer, but as a general rule try always keeping as low on polys as possible. 300 polys for a hangar sounds huge to me whatever the graphic engine. This building can easily be greatly simplified, many details cannot be seen from an aircraft cockpit, or can be featured with an adequate texturing.

    The fact that a graphic engine is powerful and can swallow heavy things should not be an excuse for not trying to optimize and reduce poly counts.

    The computing/rendering power wasted with excessive polys is not available for something else...

    Cheers

    Antoine

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  • This question cannot be answered, it depends on an enormous amount of factors.

    It really depends on how the object is being used. If you use the hangar on your airport lets say 1 to 5 times, there is no issue using 2000 polys for it. If you use this hangar 100 times on a single airport you might want to reduce the poly count. Also if adding more polys gives you the chance to maybe save on a few textures, this is also a consideration.

    As always, you should consider your overall project and ensure the total polygon count is within reasonable limits, e.g. 100000 to up to 1000000 for complex airports.

  • I'm not able to give you any quantified answer, but as a general rule try always keeping as low on polys as possible. 300 polys for a hangar sounds huge to me whatever the graphic engine. This building can easily be greatly simplified, many details cannot be seen from an aircraft cockpit, or can be featured with an adequate texturing.

    The fact that a graphic engine is powerful and can swallow heavy things should not be an excuse for not trying to optimize and reduce poly counts.

    The computing/rendering power wasted with excessive polys is not available for something else...

    Cheers

    Antoine

    I honestly wouldn't know haha, for something like UE4 or Unity I have seen buildings with easily 10,000 polys, but I am sure the simulator can not handle that. What you say is true, I shouldn't use extra performance and take away FPS or RAM if it is not making a difference. When I was texturing an object the other day I noticed that while I could see the difference between 1k, 2k, and 4k textures up close, from a distance like what you would probably see in a flight sim the difference was hard to see, I guess I wouldn't want to 4k texture a fire hydrant that is 100 meters away from the person haha.

    This question cannot be answered, it depends on an enormous amount of factors.

    It really depends on how the object is being used. If you use the hangar on your airport lets say 1 to 5 times, there is no issue using 2000 polys for it. If you use this hangar 100 times on a single airport you might want to reduce the poly count. Also if adding more polys gives you the chance to maybe save on a few textures, this is also a consideration.

    As always, you should consider your overall project and ensure the total polygon count is within reasonable limits, e.g. 100000 to up to 1000000 for complex airports.

    I am just trying to get a general idea or recommendation. If someone is already familiar with buildings in the sim then they would have some sort of idea as to what is just right. What you said is basically what I was looking for though.

    With less polys you get less realistic buildings or objects, I was thinking if I only have maybe 20 buildings then this many, or even 1000 polys wont be an issue. I will probably stick to small airports because of that reason.

    From what I understand textures don't affect performance? I am still a newbie to game design and am still learning but as I recall you could use 4k or 8k textures at a good texel density and it shouldn't affect FPS, just VRAM and RAM. Then there is the issue of disk space, not sure if someone would want to download a 10gb airport lol.

    Right now I am just trying to get some general ideas as to what is reasonable or realistic, if I can build hangars that have enough polys to make it look realistic and really high res textures to make up for a low poly count then I'm happy.

    When I finish unwrapping and texturing this building I will post some pictures here to see what you guys think, if it may be excessive, could be better etc.

  • I always stick to these rule,s

    if you don't need to model it then don't,

    If a texture map will do then use it,

    If its not seen then delete it, similar to old western movie scenery where they only made the fronts

    Save polys where you can so you can use them where you have to

    For EGGP I used 3 * 4K textures for buildings. One of those had 15 or so buildings on it and I still had space free on all of them

    EGGP had close to 700,000 polys and FS2 doesn't seem to mind

    Steve

  • Hey hey, that door knob took me a while to unwrap lol. In all seriousness you are right, I'm just adding as much detail as I can for now at a low poly count just to see what happens. What I will probably do is go max everything and if it does not run well then I can just remove some things rather than add onto it.

    I should have the textured finished version ready by tomorrow or a few days, hopefully, it is taking me an eternity right now because I have never made tiled textures, I am going to use an excessive amount of normal details to make up for poly counts.

    Here is the finished model:



    I think it has around 500 polys, the door is missing because I am going to texture the one on the right, then copy it over with the textures to the left when I am done. I think what I will do is unwrap all of the doors as separate models so I can get the texel density bigger and normal details would be easier to add, then just place them in Max when I am done as more of a modular building.