Targetware: 3D Dev Guide

Polygon Limits

Note:
The content in this section applies to models developed for inclusion on the official Target Rabaul, Target Flanders, and Target Korea servers. If you are developing for your own server, you do not have to read this section. However, if you are at all concerned with frame rates, if you would like people with computers less than 3 months old to be able to use your models, you should skim through it and make your own polygon limit.

Why limit polygons? Why not use 15,000 per plane, and have everything modeled perfectly? Because Target Rabaul is being designed as a Massively Multiplayer Online Game, not as a single-player box game. Because we want to include a massive ground object system, and we don't want frame rates to drop into the teens every time you fly over a field or city. Polygon limits are essential to keeping everyones frame rates up. 99.99% of your time spent in the game, you wont even get close enough to other airplanes to notice if they have 2000 or 10000 polygons anyway. Polygon limits are set out for each type of object in the various sections of this document.

Getting a Polygon Count: Quads, Tris, and Double-sided polys

The Targetware game engine handles everything as triangles. If you model with quad polygons, they are converted to triangles by the game engine. For Target Rabaul projects, you should be modeling with triangles. In most 3D programs, you can set object creation to default to triangles or quads. Objects you have already created can be split into triangles easily. Although the game is happy to read quads, since it counts each quad as 2 triangles, having everything in triangles from the beginning helps you keep an accurate polygon count. It is very important that you establish an accurate polygon count. 500 quad polygons is not equal to 500 triangle polygons in game rendering speed. 500 quads are equivalent to 1000 tris, as far as the game is concerned.

Double-sided Polygons

The game counts all double-sided polygons as 2 polygons. So if you have 1500 polygons in your model, but 150 of them are assigned to a 2-sided material, your actual polygon count is 1650, because you have to count the double-sided polys twice. In the example below (a low-poly anti-aircraft gun), there are 212 polygons in the model, but the game will render 237 polys (187 single-sided polys x 1 + 25 double-sided polys x 2). You might find it helps to keep track of your count if you add 'single' & 'double' to your surface/material names.