Hello everyone,

I am fairly a novice in dealing with Game Engines.
Esenthel Game Engine was attractive to me for its wide scale level one can create.
Though, I must say I still have questions that will need answers.
I started to create assets. At this moment I only model Biped characters and NPCs.
Modeling characters: Would a mesh 5k8~6000 polygons be a good rule of thumb not to exceed knowing world and environment will be visually equal to form a consistent and appealing world?

As an ensemble, I have a dual core 2.4ghz, 1 GTX 8800 1gig, 6gigs of ram and Vista 64. Would anyone advise me how many polygons the world can approximatively contain while keeping in mind the world would fit various extras in reasonable amount with particle effects and volume lights.

Thanks a bunch in advance for any advice and reasonable approximation.

Seb

it's really hard to say, it depends on many factors, the best way would be to just make some manual tests.
I think 5-15k for characters could be ok

Thanks a lot for the help.

Seb

This thread made me wonder what the max number of polygons this engine could handle, so I did a little test. I am very pleased (and surprised) with the results. I loaded a roughly 1,000,000 polygon teapot into my game with relatively no problems. Attached are a few screenshots showing it off. These are rendered using the default settings (800x600 resolution) with fog and sun enabled.

I had no problems loading the teapot into the Mesh Editor or World Editor. It ran completely smooth, even way faster than in 3DS Max, and the .MESH format trimmed off 150MB from the .DAE format it was originally in - making it only 50MB.

The only problems I ran into were actually loading it into the game. It crashes upon start if I tried to load waypoints. Not sure why, but with them turned off, I managed to successfully load the teapot using the settings below with about a 45FPS average.


Note the 1680x1050 resolution and fullscreen. (Load times are instant btw too.)

My computer specs are Intel Core2Quad Q6600 @ 2.40GHz, 4GB DDR2 RAM (or DDR3, can't remember), and a Radeon HD 5770 1GB graphics card.

Rendering a single 1,000,000 polygon teapot is nothing to boast about as it results in a single draw call to the video card, which is capable of rendering many times more polygons than that in a single draw call.

Polygon count is actually a poor measure of scene complexity. For example, you could create a 10,000 polygon scene that runs slower than a 1,000,000 polygon scene. This is because it comes down to batch count (or draw call count). You really need to measure your scene by the number of batches, not polygons.

For example, 10,000x 100 polygon teapots will render slower than 1x 1,000,000 polygon even though it is the same number of polygons. However, I believe Esenthel uses instancing, so it will probably batch them into a single call.

When creating your meshes, try to use as few sub meshes as possible as each sub mesh can result in a draw call, depending on how Esenthel handles them.

@Esenthel, it would be really handy if you could expose a draw call count from the engine each frame. That way we can see how complex our scene is by draw calls. Ogre has this, they call it a batch count.

(05-20-2010 01:17 AM)fatcoder Wrote:  For example, 10,000x 100 polygon teapots will render slower than 1x 1,000,000 polygon even though it is the same number of polygons. However, I believe Esenthel uses instancing, so it will probably batch them into a single call.

Good point, so I decided to test this as well. Attached is that same 1,000,000 polygon teapot x 400. Quite a bit slower at 0.67FPS, but it never crashed or anything. Too scared to try 800, lol.

(05-20-2010 01:17 AM)fatcoder Wrote:  When creating your meshes, try to use as few sub meshes as possible as each sub mesh can result in a draw call, depending on how Esenthel handles them.

Hmm.. interesting, don't think I realized this. Probably nothing I need to worry about tho.

Impressive... I'm amazed it runs at all. Are you sure the teapot isn't using any LOD?

I think 800 will set your video card on fire

I didn't generate any LOD for the teapot in the Mesh Editor, so as far as I know, it isn't using any. I've never even messed with LOD yet.

Just to be a bit more practical, I lowered the teapot down to 16,500 polygons and I'm getting about 32FPS (with 400 again). Also, went ahead and tried out 200 animated characters (10,000 polygons) and I'm getting roughly 29FPS. Screen is attached below.