I have a 3rd person maze based game which i intend to release on ios, at current my entire maze is at a tri count of 45876, i intend to have about 15-20 mazes, is this far to many polys?
what tri count should i aim to have?
There is no specific value or target, as there are such a dizzying array of other possible dependencies and bottlenecks that can modify that value.
Some examples are: How many lights you plan to use, visible poly ranges (how many polys can you see at a time), shader complexity, amount of overdraw (transparency related), target framerate, Lowest end supported device. Texture memory usage, texture formats, light types, GUI complexity, draw call count, dynamic and static batching on those geometries, etc. on the GPU as well as total objects counts and script complexity and bottlenecks on CPU side. Not to mention do you actually intend to load all the mazes at once, or will you only have 1 or 2 loaded at any one time, and do your players and other characters also take up resources.
Anyone who tries to give you a value is going to be either completely making up a number out of thin air, or repeating a value based on all of their specifics which isn’t really relevant to you, as you are using an entirely different set of specifications and rules. Try to build a prototype of what you want, and push it’s limits (add more stuff) until it starts going unacceptably slow.
Already answered this on your cross post: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/103483-what-should-my-tri-count-be-for-stages-for-android-3rd-person It’s pretty similar across all mobile hardware (of which varies wildly).