Pioneer dev forum

Hi question about models, who many vertices can the engine handle atm with current limitations? I saw on the wiki that the hi lod of the Bowfin has 13K tris, the new Sinonatrix hi lod has about 35000 verts. I was testing a ship a year ago for my development project built on Pioneer and yeah it pretty well caused the game to crash. Yeah... the high lod of my ship was 138485 verts. Lowering the vert count of my ship shouldn't be to much of a hassle with the re-topo tools that i have. Is there any solid vert/tri limit or is there a rule of thumb 'don't go over x number of verts'?

138k vertices should not crash Pioneer. The largest orbital has a similar number of vertices for example, and it doesn't even have lods.
There are no hard rules, but for that ship, I'd say you can go by what the new Sino has for the high lod. So about 30-35k (about the same in triangles).

Unless you're running on very old hardware, which admittedly Pioneer sometimes does, triangle count isn't a huge issue.

Triangle size is. https://www.g-truc.net/post-0662.html
and https://twitter.com/KostasAAA/status/12 ... 7896217601

You want to avoid the triangles getting too small for a given resolution.
This is fairly easy to check in a 3D modelling program, set the view to wireframe and zoom out for you whole model is in view, wherever the mesh starts to look solid in wireframe is roughly where you have too many triangles.

Then you simplify it in the offending areas.

To create LODs you can just keep repeating this process, zooming out further each time.

I found a brilliant resource describing all this the other week and I am kicking myself now that I cannot find it

Also, cool looking ship, some basic simplifcation with re-topo tools will quickly bring that count down.

A good idea is always to just release it as a mod first and let people try it out on a variety of machines