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.

What we are wondering is a performance issue. Since we have not modelled, unwrapped uvw's and texturemapped all the houses yet , we are doing performance tests using 2 or 3 houses and their clones. In a scene such as this (3 houses and their clones that makes up the 100 houses) will we be observing an accurate demonstration of the final performance of the game, Or will the results be deceiving because of the fact that the clones of these houses are using the same texture map? What I mean is: does the gamestudio reloads the texture for all the houses even if the texture is the same, or not?

Thank you very much!

The texture is of course only saved as one copy in the video-memory,
for all instances of a model. (anything else would be foolish engine programming)
So you have to make clones of the houses, where each model
is a unique sperated modelfile. (just make copies of the modelfiles, and add a numbers to them)

To make a reliable performance test you should create as many dummy models,
as you will later use in the final game. The dummy models should have the same
polycount and texturesize as the planned models.

Since you probably also make LOD versions of the models
(else the town would be terribly slow),
you have also to account for the (smaller) LOD versions of each house.

Also: make dummycalculations to
account for the AI etc. affecting the CPU usage. If every person uses a collisionmovement, you
should do so with dummy models, that walk around randomly.

For the performance test, you should test a running demo
on a variety of computers, to see the Framerate.

i see.. so what i need to do is make the copies of the models before importing into the wed, not inside the wed. Thank you very much for your detailed reply it helped a lot I will let you know about the results of the test runs.