hey guys, i was wondering whats the average tri count (or polygons) is for a low poly building in a MMO.
or
what amount of polys should i aim to get? also how many 1024 textures per building? thanks
What about 12 Tris? 
I doubt that somebody can really tell you that. This depends at too much factors. In general, as much as needed and as few as possible.
I would say grab the prototype of your MMO and simply test it 
And in case you dont have your prototype yet, then you dont need the graphics yet neither
lol 
12 tris, and sure ok ill build everything first then test XD thanks
There is no single answer:
You should always think about your target audience, how old hardware are you targeting - that’s the main factor limiting MMOs - they are targeting even the lowest hardware.
My guess is that with 100-200 you get similar looks as on MMO games.
I wonder whether the number of tris is still a main iassue nowadays
I made a test using 8 animated skinned models, 20.000 tris each
It runs quite fast and my PC is not that new, about 2 years old
Textures are heavier to draw than simple triangles. You can easily fit thousands of triangles and its still lighter than small texture map.
UEngine is kinda opposite, it can render crazy amounts of high quality textures but you can see it in just about every UEngine game… there’s crazy texture lag as the engine unloads textures and loads new textures andthey appear as extremely blurry and ugly blobs first. Take a look at Mass Effect or Borderlands as example :roll:
Most important thing is to decide your camera angle and how close do you want, at worst, view everything. There’s tens of thousands of triangles in single building in WoW, especially in those which you can enter. Simple farm house with closed doors etc is under 500.
You can get software like 3D Ripper DX ( 3D Ripper DX ) to capture textures and everything inside camera (well it loads it from memory, but still). Just remember that using those models for anything profitable (and most cases even unprofitable) is illegal and Activision Blizzard (or whoever else) is prepeared to defend their assets :twisted:
edit: When FPS starts to drop due to art assets, textures are usually the first things to get checked and scaled down. Then effects (effects are kinda checked on the same run as they tend to have larger textures). The triangle counts are far in the blame line, but wasted triangles is always bad. If you spend 15% extra on all models, you’ll end up with a number that really hurts. Thus optimization is the key and only using triangles that REALLY BENEFIT. If you can only see 1 pixel difference in rendered image, the triangle is probably useless.
ok, thanks alot for the really helpfull replys! i didn’t know wow had that many tris from looking at the buildings i thought it was a reaaal low count, but i guess they also have their FOV quite low too, also i try to optimize everything, textures and tris most of my weapon textures (one per weapon) come out at 15kb.
and yea about unreal engine, i was playing gears of war and wondering how the hell they have so many nice textures especially per building, i see like 5 differnt bumps load on like one building
edit: heres my finished (empty) church its 742 tris, im not sure if its good or not amount and it has 2x15kb textures…would you forsee any problems with this in a small village?
A building that size and importance could as well have more polys, if you can think of details that might require more form
I counted the ‘inside assets’ as well to the wow house triangle count ;D
ah ok yea ill have a 600 tri weapon in there along with seats, lights, candles, books and perhaps some support beams ect
6months ago I replaced my 8 year old computer (it was my main/the only machine at home). Originally it had GeForce2 (well…I have to admit that I replaced it by more decent card at some point). Anyway - 2 year old computer is not that old
Honestly, get that DXRipper program, open up your favourite mmo, and capture away. I’s a great exercise in seeing how they do detail relative to eye-level.