RevanFan wrote:I personally want them to be realistic, regardless of how it may affect the game's resource consumption. If you're running an even slightly modern system, default Madden or Madden with current mods takes almost no system resources. Well, it's not even close to being a hog, anyway.
trey31 wrote:Actually you'd be surprised. That Revo Speed model's OBJ data is only 6MB. and it's extremely detailed. The obj file contains 270,988 lines of uncompressed data, and it's still roughly only 1/5th the data size of one single HD crowd texture (Virdeeman's crowd mod in uncompressed .png format that we worked on as beta before release was over 30MB), and there are hundreds of crowd textures rendered at a time depending on the stadium. Using the 4K crowd texture in testing, I didn't notice any stutter issues at all (though I do have discrete graphics cards...)
Even close-up with wire frame off and shadows on, the faces are visible without any textures.
Well, here's the thing guys. It's less about people's computers being able to run it, and more about the game's engine being able to handle it. File size isn't really an issue, but rather polygon count. Keep in mind, this is a PS2 game engine. There may be a limit to how many polygons it can render at once without spazing out. Another thing that is different than texture files, is that polygons can't be tiled. Those crowd files are a single image loaded into memory once and just repeated multiple times. That keeps the memory usage down. However, polygons don't work that way. There's going to be 22 helmets on the field, and each polygon of them will need to be rendered 22 separate times. There is no repeating. Add to that any other high poly models we add in the future, and you can see where I'm going.
The point being, we shouldn't go too crazy with poly counts just because we can. There's a good chance it will cause problems down the road. Besides, you can get realism without having an insane number of polygons. Take the Doom Guy's helmet from last year's Doom for example:
Spoiler:
And compare that to the high poly speedflex model:
Spoiler:
The high poly speedflex, while very nice looking, likely wouldn't give you any better results in game than the Doom helmet, or the lower poly speedflex version:
Spoiler:
And the extra polys would just serve to tax the game engine.
Because of all that, if we're going to up the poly counts from the current in game models, I'd suggest finding a happy medium. Something that gives a good amount of detail and realism, while also not being excessive. Something closer to the Doom Guy's helmet or the lower poly Speedflex posted above get's my vote. That way it looks good, but is less likely to overwhelm a 10-15 year old game engine. Plus it has the added benefit of being able to run on lower end hardware, so win-win.
End of the day though, community decision. If you guys want to go high poly, I can do that. My concerns have been noted
