I’m not sure if this is the right place to put this, but oh well.
I’ve got just a small question, I’ve got a gun model that’s 5735 faces and since I’m making an FPS game I’d expect to have maybe around 20-30 on screen at once, is this too much or just enough?
No one could possibly tell you if it’s too much to achieve your desired FPS because we don’t even know your target computer specs, let alone all the other elements the game will require.
However, on a purely practical level, 5,000 polys per gun is far too many when you expect to have 20-30 of them, purely because you won’t possibly have 20-30 of them all close enough to the camera that you’ll see the detail all those polys have added. Use a simple LOD system and replace the high poly models with low poly substitutes when they are a certain distance from the camera.
Oh right, I did forget to add that stuff, I’m thinking for computer something like a GeForce 7800 with 2gigs of ram and 2.50 Ghz or something around there.
And I did think 5000 was a bit much, I might just use the 5000 model for the up close gun and make an even lower-poly version for all the other guns and try to get it to about 1000-1500 faces.
Honestly, for just a gun, 1500 faces is pretty high. It’d probably be worthwhile to see if you could get rid of a lot of faces (say, edge loops along the barrel of the gun). If you’re using subdivision surfaces, go down a level, and see if you can actually see any difference when the gun is actually in the game.