HPL2 Polygon Budget

**Alex Ros** · 11-09-2012, 04:32 PM

Still can't understand, what number of polygons can appear in a scene and still be rendered at an acceptable frame rate at HPL2. It's crucially important question even on stage of planning maps and without clear understanding of limitations I just can't move on. I know somehow it depends of player's computer. Also I know that HPL2 is more sensitive to objects count, not polygons. Anyway, I've read through HPL wiki, searching for answer. I've searched here on forum. But no fulfilling answer's found. Is there a concrete-particular-specific polygon budget limit, when there's a danger that a game would just crash to desktop? I can't believe nobody knows. And I don't need answers like "just be carefool" or "just check it ingame from time to time". It's not the answer, it's some sort of a stone age answer.

Nearly forgot. Elementary politeness is always good without doubt.
So thanks in advance. And thanks for understanding.

**WALP** · 11-09-2012, 04:58 PM

It mostly depends on how many polygons there are where you are looking. So The smaller the object the less polygons. Myself I have a 10,000 polygon terrain in the mod I am working on, but it dosent hurt framerate to a point where it matters since a terrain is so big.
Theres not really a clear answer around as to how many polygons should be the budget, since first of all people have different pc's, and also theres a lot of other things to take into account like, Do these objects use physics? are they animated? Texture resolution? and so on...

**Acies** · 11-09-2012, 05:08 PM

No, there has been no tests on that. I know though, that with "my system" I was able to create an environment with ~ 300k polygons + lighting + particles. Somewhere around there lag would start for me. As for crashing, I don't know.

Just out of curiosity, is there any engine where X amount of polygons causes a crash?

**Alex Ros** · 11-09-2012, 05:29 PM

(11-09-2012, 05:08 PM)Acies Wrote: Just out of curiosity, is there any engine where X amount of polygons causes a crash?

Yes of course. Most of engines do have such a limitation. If there's a compile level-map procedure and you've exceeded the polygon limit the level wouldn't just compile. That simple. And most of engines do have a compiling step. And it's not about visible-to-player or invisible-to-player polygons - there's just a specific limit and you have to always point it mind.

Quote:...Myself I have a 10,000 polygon terrain in the mod I am working on, but it dosent hurt framerate...

Well looks like it could be a helpful number. At the moment I'm making pack of the new trees and looks like if a single one uses 300-400 triangles, it's quite fine. And if the whole park could "eat" something around 7-8 thousands it also wouldn't crash HPL2. That's nice.

**xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx** · 11-11-2012, 11:05 AM

As for maximum polygon number per level - I don't know (we'd have to ask Frictional I guess) but it should be fairly easy to check. Just create a sphere with 10.000 triangles and spam it in an otherwise empty level, trying the game after every sphere. When it crashes just count how many spheres you have.

When it comes to polygons on-screen however, it depends on what kind of culling HPL uses. (culling = keeping invisible polygons from being calculated) Some engines for example can only use the camera frustrum to cull away objects, some can check if an object is occluded by another one. Others have an approach where they will place "portals" in levels (for example at the entrance of a room) and cull everything behind it as long as the player can't see through it.

So depending on the method HPL is using for culling, a level with many polygons but a lot of corners and no clear lines of sight might even run better than a level with less polygons that is more open...

**Alex Ros** · 11-11-2012, 04:57 PM

Some specific numbers, which I was seeking for...

Frictional low-poly pine-tree made of 732 triangles. And at the same time the high-poly pine-tree made of 961 triangles. Both versions of pine-trees are used at Zimmerman Vision map. High-poly near the player and low-polys on the background. Finally, there're at the Zimmerman Vision map approximately 30 low-poly pine-trees and 3 high-poly ones. As result we have something around 30.000 used by trees alone. There's also a terrain, grass, stones, houses, fences and a water pump. I believe it wouldn't be a complete mistake to say that the whole map could cost approximately 40.000 triangles.

Quite a nice number and good enough to become an orientation. And by the way Zimmerman Vision map is a very small open map, so there's no automatic HPL2 culling, all is rendered for sure...

P.S. Of course, there's also a textures budget, physical objects and entities limitations, lights and dynamic shadows... but that's another story... it was all strictly about statical environment.

**The chaser** · 11-11-2012, 05:22 PM

There was a thread made by candlejack where he had problems with a slenderman model that made the editor crash. The model had about 106,601 polygons. He tried with others and he couldn't manage to get it working.

**Alex Ros** · 11-11-2012, 05:28 PM

100.000 polygons is extremely high for an animated character. Are we talking about animated Slender, aren't we? There's no computer that can handle calculations of all moving joints-polygons. So there's nothing unexpected with a 100.000 polygonal character crashes.

**The chaser** · 11-11-2012, 05:33 PM

(11-11-2012, 05:28 PM)Alex Ros Wrote: 100.000 polygons is extremely high for an animated character. Are we talking about animated Slender, aren't we? There's no computer that can handle calculations of all moving joints-polygons. So there's nothing unexpected with a 100.000 polygonal character crashes.

Well, it wasn't animated finally. I believe, but I don't really know it, that the polygon count that HPL supports is about 70.000. I pre-apologize if I'm wrong.

Also, shouldn't this be in Techincal support? I mean, it isn't anything of CS's.

**Alex Ros** · 11-11-2012, 05:46 PM

It doesn't really matters if that 100.000 slender wasn't animated. Even if they tried to do so and put ingame they could surely fail. It's incredible. It's too high-poly for a animated model, no matter if it's a character or, for example, mechanism.

As for discussion of poly budgets itself... well as long as everything at any CS is made of polygons I believe it's a right place to discuss poly budgets of HPL2.

And technical support is mostly about bugs of the game as I understand it, nothing with development of CS. Well maybe I'm wrong...