Re: [Algorithms] Character customization Vs Number of primitives

[Benjamin R. <ben...@gm...>]

On 13/06/07, Ivan-Assen Ivanov <iva...@gm...> wrote:
>
> > The game I'm working on has around 30 customizable characters that will
> be
> > displayed during a match.
> >
> > Each character has an armor, made by 5 different fragments (arm, legs,
> body,
> > head, name)....
>
> 30 characters times 6 (1 body + 5 armor?) times 4 passes (color,
> shadowing, glow, lighting) = 720 draw calls per frame. That's
> perfectly reasonable - don't overengineer until you can prove this is
> a bottleneck.
>
> We have a mode in our engine where we draw just the first triangle
> from each drawcall to judge whether we're drawcall- or something
> else-limited.
>
> Best regards,
> Assen
>

Agreed, but to the 720 Draw calls, you should add the rest of the scene, the
GUI, the FX ...
This could still be reasonable, but we are also targeting vs_1_1 machines
where you can only render 20 bones per draw call. Since most of our
characters will have ~45-50 bones, this would lead to a much bigger number
of draw calls. It's true that we are not draw-call limited yet, but
optimizing the texture available is often easier than optimizing the number
of draw calls.

Ben