Hello.

I have just now had the time to really sit down and start my first game, and have some cool things in mind...but..

Its an outdoor city enviorment, which is not impossible, but I hear you need many tricks to get it to run smoothly with 3DGS.

My point of the question, is I fear I may be reaching my comps limits WAY too early. I mean, I simply have an empty room, no codes, and a default "flying" cam, and it runs with 97%+ power being used.
Plus, I put about 36 models in the there, with about 420 faces each (totaling about 15,000 faces), and I THINK I have noticed slowdown. If it is, its not much, and it may just be me thinking it is. But if it IS, Im being struck down before I can even get off the ground, as far as my project gos.

So, my question is, is about how many faces SHOULD my system be able to handle, with:

2.2 ghz prossecor
448 mb memory
64 mb graphic card (no pixel shader)

I heard "the average" system can handle around 30,000 faces, but what I was reading never really said what the average system was. If thats true, I dont think I would be able to run my game on MY system..and that makes me sad.

your system is lacking a decent videocard... still it should run better than this, I would do some better entity handling, such as deleting entities that arent going to be used. Its going to be hard, but one thing to remember is that is better to have one big model than many small ones. With a machine like that, your going to have to do a lot of tweaking to get it to work but it is possible. You'll never get great graphics, but you should be able to at least achieve some stuff like gta III graphics.

Heh heh. Block people. Awsome...but not for my game.

Iam NOT new to making games, but am sorta new to 3D, however I know enough to start making 3D games. Iam fresh from 4-5 years of Game Maker: http://www.gamemaker.nl/

The thing is, is I can play games that are plenty detailed, like Halo, Need for speed underground, gta 3, ect. But yet 3DGS slows down at a mere 6,000 faces?

If you could tell me how to run in debug (before I look it up, lol ), I would be greatful.

press f11 during your game

Alright. Thnx for telling me how to do that, cuz I REALLY couldnt find it in the manual, lol. Debug helped alot. I noticed several things, and hope you can give me your opinion as to whats going on:

I had about 6 buses I made, each 370 faces each. They have 2 skins, one 512X512 other 512X256.

1. It DOES slow down, but mainly when I move right up-close to the buses. I notice of course, that the engine makes the teures smaller the farther you are from it. I then read in the manual that games with lower end graphic cards run faster with (I think) 256x256 or smaller tetures, which would explain why it runs faster when Im not up close to them.

2. I then found out how to run in fullscreen (FINALLY), and began playing with the resolutions. When I got it in 800x600, in full, it would keep a SOLID 60 fps, and even faster in windowed mode.

Would using 256x256 or smaller textures on models rather than around 512x512 matter THAT much, that it would slow down my game by 10-20+ fps?

Would you know if it would be best to have the game always run in 800x600-full or windowed, (or at least start that way) or would it not matter so much on higher end systems?

maybe you should use lod for all your models...make 3 other models with lower polycount and smaller textures (just have to name the models name_0.mdl, name_1.mdl, name_2.mdl, name_3.mdl)