Planning a 3d Level

Questions & Answers
1

I am building a 3d Scene for a beginner’s project-- it’s a small outdoor town that the user drives around in a small car, exploring. (I’m just trying to bulid this for the PC, and not mobile devices).

So far, I haven’t put in any systems-- it’s just a little car driving around town, and some colliders that keep the car driving on the sidewalk as opposed to flying through space. I want to put a maximum amount of detail/atmosphere into the town, though I am at a beginners level. But I don’t plan to have any spawning enemies, no combat systems, nothing with Rigidbodies, very little “Realtime” content; a lot of menu systems and variables and if-statements and lots-of-text, but basically, hopefully, just a simple beginners project…

However: I’m worried though that I’m creating something that’ll be too “heavy” performance-wise, though, if I add too much small detail to the town. But when I look at the Stat window and I have a hard time understanding what I should be looking for.

In my stat window, the FPS number seems to always be between 60-110, and batches seem to be between 50-120, but I don’t know when I should be worried about those numbers being too high or low (and most of the advice I see online is for mobile projects, which I am not aiming for). This answer suggests that the stat window itself is even’t trustworthy, which I do not know how to adjust for either. I don’t know what GOOD numbers are or BAD numbers – and anyone I can see talking about that online seems to be talking about mobile apps (which I’m not trying to build).

I find it hard to know if I’m making good choices or being overly conservative. Or if there are steps I should be taking now that I don’t see coming (e.g., not doing full 1024 x 1024 textures for the diffuse maps of the models, but instead doing a single small palette for every model, as I’ve seen others do on the internet…).

I am worried because I am about to begin building a lot of small models to fill out the town (e.g., benches, trash cans, etc.), and do not feel like I know the “true costs” for those models, performance-budget-wise.

Example: At one point, I tested having a lot of point lights, so that every lamp post put out a soft light. I liked how it looked, but I noticed the batch number went up by, like, 10x. It still seemed to display fine on my home computer (which is not state of the art), but I was worried it’d create a heavy technical burden down the line so I took them out for now. But I don’t even know if those stats are something I have to worry about for a desktop project.

I found this to be helpful but I don’t think it quite answered how I should judge performance, or I struggled to understand that. The wiki seems to suggests just looking at vertex counts…?

Am I worried over nothing? Any advice?

2

Your second link has some pretty nice general tips you could try to follow. Also if you are making a big city game you may want to plan for some sort of Level of Detail setup so further away objects get reduced in complexity. If you want some arbitrary numbers I would try to keep draw calls below 1000 and vertices below 2 million or something. This really depends on your hardware and target platform and bunch of other things though, but that is like a ballpark estimate (at least within an order of magnitude lol).

You should just start making your game and once it starts running badly then maybe try to explore some optimizations. All the things you suggested are relevant and are good that you are aware of, but trying to worry so much about this when you are relatively new is getting in your way imo. You will learn what kind of things become bottlenecks down the line and avoid/prepare for them in the future. As the article suggested “Don’t spend time trying to optimize some obscure code or reducing the size of a texture unless you know it is a bottleneck”. So I say make game first, then optimize problems as you find them.

3

Thanks for the advice! Much appreciated.