Monsters

[Unbreakable]

What kind of poly count are we looking at for some of these monsters? or whatever u want to call 'em ;)

[Lord FlatHead]

The in-game character models are about 2000-5000 polys, while the reference models (which are used for skinning information, but don't actually appear in the game) are between 100,000 and a quarter million.

[Tarkus]

If poly counts were gameplay... I'd be a very happy man. =)

[Naked Snake]

Tarkus said:

If poly counts were gameplay... I'd be a very happy man. =)

To some people, the polycount of monsters is more important than the gameplay. I don't really care how many polygons make up a monsters toe, I expect action, suspense and stained pants (not really on that last one) from Doom 3, damnit.

[dsm]

A superb game to me would be a game with great looking characters and environments (I don't care HOW they achieve it) AND great gameplay - note that gameplay to me has mostly something to do with feel.

Gameplay: Satisfying feel when you shoot enemies (satisfying sounds combined with satisfying pain reactions from enemies), fun maps, fun puzzles, GREAT weapons (dosn't need to be new weapons, just great weapons with a wonderful feel to them). I'm not interested in fancy (often RPG'ish) puzzles - to me, a game's gameplay has primarily something to do with the general feel - that's why I like id's games even if they don't change the basic concept.

Looks: Eye candy is great for the WOW factor and a more realistic-looking game helps immerse the player (and immersion is quite a gameplay factor).

I usually rate gameplay over looks, but if looks and gameplay are combined, it just beats everything.
The original Doom just mixed looks and gameplay together in a perfect way, that's why I love it (even today I can look at it and think that it has great graphics although it's outdated graphics).

[Shaviro]

Tarkus said:

If poly counts were gameplay... I'd be a very happy man. =)

Don't be too worried about the gameplay. It's gonna be great, trust me :)

[Spike]

Takes me back to arguments about how many onscreen, animated sprites a 486 could handle with the original DooM :)

[Naked Snake]

QUOTE FROM THE BEYOND3D INTERVIEW WITH JOHN CARMACK!!!

It appears the models are low in poly count. Knowing what I know, it would appear that the reason for this, specifically with regards to your engine, is because of the shadow volume based lighting. With higher poly counts, your engine's speed would suffer. Am I correct? And how would ATI's TruForm look?

The game characters are between 2000 and 6000 polygons. Some of the heads do look a little angular in tight zooms, so we may use some custom models for cinematic scenes.

Curving up the models with more polygons has a basically linear effect on performance, but making very jagged models with lots of little polygonal points would create far more silhouette edges, which could cause a disproportionate slowdown during rendering when they get close.

TruForm is not an option, because the calculated shadow silhouettes would no longer be correct.

[Lord FlatHead]

Tarkus said:

If poly counts were gameplay... I'd be a very happy man. =)

Polycount doesn't mean anything. I can make a 500,000 poly cube and it would still be a cube.