How important is polycount nowadays?

[gabyalufix]

It\'s been a LONG time since I last did any real modelling. I did mods for quake and half-life I. So I imagine that things have changed a bit since my day.

How much does polycount contribute to framerate? Is the rendering trivial compared to the cost of physics simulation? Can I just go nuts and add little doodads all over the place, compensating for my complete inability to texture properly by just modelling everything?

If you max the polycount (it\'s like 15-20k, yes? In my day, we made MAPS with less.) on all your parts, will you see a performance drop? Or will it be completely un-noticable?

[jgjiscool]

A lot of parts do have considerable detail on them. Some detail is alright and obviously you want to have some defining features, but most of the lag KSP experiences is based in the VAB and it\'s fairly constant no matter what parts you have. I haven\'t noticed parts to actually influence the frame rate in the latest versions except in the VAB.

[Guest TonyZ]

It\'s been a LONG time since I last did any real modelling. I did mods for quake and half-life I. So I imagine that things have changed a bit since my day.

How much does polycount contribute to framerate? Is the rendering trivial compared to the cost of physics simulation? Can I just go nuts and add little doodads all over the place, compensating for my complete inability to texture properly by just modelling everything?

If you max the polycount (it\'s like 15-20k, yes? In my day, we made MAPS with less.) on all your parts, will you see a performance drop? Or will it be completely un-noticable?

Poly count is still *very* important, but it still depends on the video card reproducing the model. What works for you won\'t necessarily perform well for me. KSP itself is physics heavy, not so much polygon heavy. There\'s a trade off to be made there as well.

Generally most 'gaming' GPU\'s made after 2004 can handle insanely high poly counts by yesterdays standards. It\'s the shaders that kill them.

It\'s more about textures and shaders now-a-days, but using only as many poly\'s as you need on a model is still important.

[imdying]

Take a part that has a modest 2000 count, then stack 50 of those together to make a rocket. Still works good doesn\'t it That should pretty much sum up what\'s relevant to you

There is bugger all in the way of \'scenery\' to hog your FPS, so you might as well go nuts on the parts. I\'m halfway through my first part (I\'m a programmer but it\'s always good to know how modders work from start to finish!), and I\'ve aimed for < 5000, and if it runs ok on my old 6320/8800GTS, then it should be good to go.

[gabyalufix]

Heh. And yesterday I was worrying about my 2000-poly radial decoupler . . .

It would have seemed like a lot, in 1997.

[imdying]

For sure. I\'m lucky that I have Godammit taking my models (made in sketchup) and unwraps them in blender for me. When he does that, he optimises it down as far as he can (typically saves around 10% on a model that I\'ve not been too lazy with).

You could really go to town on the detailing if you were good, and given there is no bump mapping (yet?), it\'s probably worth it too.

[sarkun]

When modeling my shuttle, I went to town on one part, modeling the insides of a RCS tank with multiple separate tanks for fuel, oxidizer, lots of small pipes connecting them etc (the shuttle can fall apart on hard landing, so you can actually see that) The first, unoptimized version of the part had like 14k polys. The only noticable difference was the time it took KSP to load the part for the first time. In various places around the forum, people are saying that texture size is much more important that polygon count.

[Tosh]

As for my experience with 20 000- 7000-poly Gemeni parachute the game may take a minute to build a binary mesh, it may even fail to do so and freeze at startup -- but as soon as binary is built that thousands of polygons not likely affect an overall lag.

Parts count means much more. Having only 200 parts in one scene (each being a simple 12-face cube with 8x8 texture) turns a game into a slideshow on my 1.8 CoreDuo

[C7Studios]

My part budget is 1.5k for really high end showpiece parts and all others are under 1k. I think my part average is near 700 polys. I figure this game is going to have a ton of parts on screen at one time. It adds up quick. I don\'t want to be the part pack that makes your pc have a fit.

[imdying]

Once we get some sort of idea about how the game is going to be played (big picture), then that\'ll make a big difference to how you decide on limits. Like C7 says, you don\'t want to be lag it out when there\'s a ton of parts on the screen, but maybe that\'ll never happen in the regular course of the game, and it\'ll only be possible in sandbox mode. If that\'s the case, then it depends on whether your pack targets campaign or sandbox. But we\'ve not be told much of anything, so there\'s nothing to aim for. For all we know there\'s not going to be a campaign or sandbox mode.

Just make whatever you like, currently it\'s a goal-less wilderness and anything you develop could be rendered useless at any stage on the whim of the devs. In my own experience I ran out of motivation for adding detail (on a part that might be a waste of time anyway) before the poly count got high enough to worry me.

I\'d like a little more direction from the devs so we can build things that will actually add value to the game as they envisage it (for example, spaceplanes... a lot have been made, but they might all be eliminated from the real game by requiring config parameters that the campaign mode will never allow, for all we know) . I suspect that vision doesn\'t actually exist as something croncrete yet, or they\'re not sure it\'s all actually \'doable\', so in the meantime we just have to be patient and hang on for the ride.

[GoDamitt]

So this got me wondering, how many polys are in one of every vanilla part, for reference.

I opened all the vanilla parts in Blender and recorded their poly, edge, vertices counts.

Over 13K of polys

Look here.

[Darrknox]

Unity is no UDK, especially since the devs are building from scratch. So polycount is something one needs to keep in mind, but it really depends on what you\'re building and how much of it you can just texture, and how much of it looks better as actual geometry. The vanilla parts are 90% textures, but that hasn\'t stopped a lot of people from going crazy with geometry. Sometimes people can\'t use those mods, but for the most part it all works the same. The problem comes in when people are building larger, and larger rockets. If everyone has large tris counts, it\'s going to slow down the game in rendering all those models at once. But even that depends on how much ram you have, and what not. Generally though, if you make your mods optimized you\'ll have more fans.

[jgjiscool]

Still I find that most of the lag happens only at loading, in the VAB and right at the start of launch! This game must have one effective system! Even in 0.11 it would slideshow if you had too big a rocket, but 0.13.2? I CANNOT make it lag! At all! There\'s a slightly longer pause after pressing launch... and then it\'s crystal clear! Strange!

[imdying]

Yeah, lag off the launch pad would be my only bugbear. They did great work on the last revision in regards to fps, so things are looking pretty rosy

[gabyalufix]

Heh. When I make my rockets, I LAAAAAAAAGGGGGG.

But that\'s all due to physics effects. Too many modules = too much calculation. I don\'t think the polycount affects it much at all.