Hi,
we just started using gamestudio for a project; in which we are modeling a small town. We are using 3ds max for the modeling, not the med. Each house in the town will consist of approximately 600 - 800 triangles and there will be around 100 houses in the town. Other than that we are planning to model trees, rocks, animals, villagers walking around. We are considering to use texturemaps of size 512x512 (1024 would be even better..) and other than that bump, normal, reflection maps if we can.

I have a question regarding the models that we are using. After modelling them (cubical houses with sharp corners) in 3ds max when I import them into med, if I am to close the mesh using the merge button, the model looks distorted and faceted (due to Gouraud shading?), when it is open there is no problem. I have read in the forums that open models cause performance issues so I was wondering if there is any way to get around that faceted look of the models after closing the mesh? or is it perfectly normal for my case to use open models in the game. Considering the polygon count of our final scene ( an openair area with 100 houses with each of the min of 600 trinagles) would you say that we are about to face some real performance issues?

Thank you very much