Chapter 4: Terrain Objects

Polygon limits

There are no hard and fast rules about how many polygons a terrain object must have, or how complex it must be, or how large it's texture file should be. But if you are designing for a multiplayer environment--and since there's no enemy AI, you probably are--then you will want to design your ground objects with performance in mind. If you only want a few items, say a small airfield with a control tower, 2 hangars, 4 AA guns, a fuel tank, and a radar dish, then you could put a lot of detail into each object without suffering a serious frame rate hit when flying overhead. But if your vision is for a grand spectacle of ships (or tanks/troops/bldgs/etc) that covers the horizon from east to west, then you will probably want to plan each individual object to have a smaller number of polygons. One thing to remember is that a person flying a plane will only rarely get within 100 yards of anything, and if he's in the air, he's only going to see an object up close for a microsecond.