GeorgeS,
From what I have seen in terms of poly limit. The number is quite high however there is a catch. Openzone has its compile limitations when it comes to both the shear size of files as well as the quality of the textures being used.
A simply example of this was a redesign of the westcommons zone from EQ classic. Our team rebuilt the zone from the ground up adding more size as well as a new Orc stronghold burried within the sanddunes along the side. After populating the zone with over 1000 or more trees each broken into 3 seperate imports(1 for the trunk, tho that part was kept low in poly count, 1 for the top-facing branches, and 1 for the bottom-facing branches) per tree set, which at 200 trees, there were roughly 5 sets (5*3=15 import groups of very high poly count) added to the terrain (broken into floor, 3 border sections, and the fort and tunnels them selves) as well as all of the "junk" that was scattered about the zone (new wizard portal, druid ring, camo'd scout towers, and destroyed variants, Orc tents and campfire, signs for direction, and much more). After all only completing the proper import of 3 sets, being 9 imports for trees after the terrain was imported, an error prompted us that Openzone did not have enough memory to contine, and that it had reached its limit, of i believe 2 or maybe 3 gigs.
Mind you that the machine we were using had 12 gigs ram, and 3 Tera Hdd as well as was running 64 bit xp with all proper drivers and we had dual 4870s rocking 1 gig vram each...
I believe the reason for the crash was because of the high quality/resolution of the textures being used and the overwhelming number within. using 2048x2048 for nearly every texture, in .bmp format, each was roughly 12m... and for each piece of each set of the trees, there were anywhere from 1000 to 6000 renders of the texture. at 12m, simply 1000 would need 12000m if the system did not simply cache the texture in the database for multiple use. also before i forget to mention, alpha channel textures for branches/leaves were also present on all 1000 - 6000 planes doubling the 12m to 24 per face.
Mathematically the volume used was almost endless, and the render times within max its self was actually visable... normally its click and done.. looking back, dropping the textures from 2048 to 1024 or simply 512 would have drastically changed this, but our goal was to push the limits... and apparently we broke them.
Let me know if you are interested in trying to perhaps put something together. If you need stuff modeled, and have some kind of concept art... I'm more then happy to see what i can do for you. It will be created in 3ds max fyi.
EternalBlack
Member of OrisonIndustries
|