I know without all of the details about the project this question is not specific enough for a definite answer but I just want to use this as a general target to tell my 3d modeler what to shoot for. I also don’t have the iOS version of unit yet, because we are saving for iOS Pro soon so I can’t really do any testing at the moment.
I am working on a RTS style game that will be multi-platform which will include iOS, there will be at most 20-30 units possible on screen at one time and environments will be fairly flat with really low poly shrubbery. What kind of polycount should my modeler shoot for when creating a low poly version of character models for iOS?
35-40 units on-screen in an iPhone game seems unfeasible. Aside from performance, they would be little more than dots on a 3.5" screen. You could probably make it work with sprites rather than animated characters, though that doesn’t fix the size problem.
–Eric
I actually am thinking that number is too high, it will more likely be around 20-30 max. The characters are very small and are grouped together so when zoomed out they would look very small, but I am implementing a zooming system and hopefully some kind of LOD system so when zoomed in more detailed models could be used. I also may need to scale the number of characters possibly from the desktop version down for iOS, so maybe the max character limit would be 15-20 on iOS, either way what kind of polycount is feasible? If it helps think of Red Alert 3 for iphone, you can definitely see more than 15-20 characters on screen at once, I just don’t have the experience to really know how low of a polycount to shoot for.