Oolite Bulletins

Is there a limit as to how complex models can be, before it starts affecting playability in slowing the game down etc? One of my test ships seemed to be making the game chug a bit during testing [admittedly spawing 10 at a time on launch though]. The King Cobra has around 4000 NFACES according to the .dat, my current new model has over 5000, just wondering if i should try and thin it out a bit? i guess most/all people have more capable machines these days compared to the days when we were limited to 127 vertices, but i'd try and make the models as widely available as possible.

cheers

I cannot find a max limit for the model face count, so I'll have to conclude that performance with complex models should be system dependent, Older systems will have a harder time with them, but today's systems should not really be affected, even with plenty of high poly models around. You should always try to optimize models by reducing face counts where possible or by clever use of normal maps etc., but I'd say the standard action plan is to use your own system as a benchmark and try to optimize your models for that. If a 5K-poly model runs OK on your computer, chances are it will run OK also on the majority of today's systems.

What would be relevant measures to define the model size?
And how can it be evaluated, looking at existing OXPs?

Killer Wolf wrote: ↑Sun May 14, 2023 9:40 am

Is there a limit as to how complex models can be, before it starts affecting playability in slowing the game down etc? One of my test ships seemed to be making the game chug a bit during testing [admittedly spawing 10 at a time on launch though]. The King Cobra has around 4000 NFACES according to the .dat, my current new model has over 5000, just wondering if i should try and thin it out a bit? i guess most/all people have more capable machines these days compared to the days when we were limited to 127 vertices, but i'd try and make the models as widely available as possible.

cheers

KW, what happens if you limit the spawning to just one of your test ships? Does it speed up? Or is the slowing down due to something else?

The Sidewinder and Mamba i uploaded in my SpecGloss thread are somewhere around 6,000 triangles each, I'm not sure of the vertex count but it's going to be high just because of all the smoothing groups and hard edges i've used doubling the vertex count along those edges, i've a Cobra mk III out there too and that model is about 40,000 triangles, really causes oolite to take a few seconds pause loading that model in, even on an SSD drive!

I always wondered what was more taxing on the video card, a high polygon count or large textures, seems there's no straight forward answer, other than poly counts are harder on the cpu and textures are harder on the system memory (or so i saw online), plus then you have shaders etc on top of that eating up more processing time, its amazing how fast really video cards can get through all the work they need to do to get everything calculated and into the video buffer ready to go onscreen 60 times a second!

Groan!

Piratical Potatoes!!

Swashbuckling Spuds!!!

Groan!!!!


(That's the effect of "contaminating a perfectly good baked potato with those ghastly baked beans" on one's aesthetic sensibilities)

Griff wrote: ↑Sun May 14, 2023 8:04 pm

... i've a Cobra mk III out there too and that model is about 40,000 triangles...

Be that the one I fly (Griff_HighPoly_CobraIII_multiDecal)? 'Tis a thing of beauty! <wanders away, singing 40,000 Headmen>

hiran wrote: ↑Sun May 14, 2023 3:23 pm

What would be relevant measures to define the model size?
And how can it be evaluated, looking at existing OXPs?

Now I extended the OoliteAddonScanner to collect model metrics (expansion, model filename, vertexes and faces).
With that I found out the biggest model available via expansion manager is about 27 k faces.

The latest index is available at https://github.com/HiranChaudhuri/Oolit ... x-20230515

thanks for the answers/info.

spawning less ships made things smoother. as the test script is an on-launch thing, there's a planet, station and other ships around, which all contributed, so maybe things aren't worth worrying about too much. i just didn't want to spend yonks doing a new fighter then have people put off using her because 3 of them in a pack of pirates drops them to 3fps or something. i'll do a few tests around the 5k mark if i can, see what that's like.

cheers