Thursday, April 2, 2009
Short break
Since the over world has not been running very smoothly in game lately, I'm taking some time to go back and remake it. No, I am not remaking it from scratch, I am just reducing the poly count in places that are needlessly complex. This should only take a week at most, and the only difference you will notice in game is a better frame rate.
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4 comments:
Excuse my stupidity.. what is poly count?
A poly count refers to the amount of polygons a model has. A polygon, otherwise known as a triangle, is generally made up of three lines connected by vertices. Each vertex is located at a specific point is space.
To visualize it, imagine a cube, at each corner of the cube is a vertex, which would give the cube a total of 8 vertices. For the polygons/triangles you would connect three verticies together with lines, meaning our cube has 12 polygons (two for each side) a model (like the island) is basically a very complex version of this, sort of like a very complex jigsaw puzzle.
The more polygons a model has, the more work your computer has to do to render (show) it. This is why 3d games today look much better then 3d games from 10 years ago, the systems you play them on are more powerful so game makers can use more polygons in their models, which makes them more detailed.
Each polygon/triangle can have a texture applied to it, for example, Link is made up of lots of polygons with one texture applied to all of them.
When I started making the island I made a very stupid mistake, since the game used a bunch of small textures (tiles) to make up the overworld (using the same tile in multiple places) I made seprate polygons for each tile, this wasn't too bad at first, but by the time I was finished the island had over 300,000 polygons which really slowed our game down. So what I am doing now is going to each quadrant, removing all the small polygons with one big polygon with a more detailed texture that looks like all the small tiles.
The end result is the island looks exactly the same, but your computer doesn't have to work as hard to show it, meaning the game will run faster.
Understand now?
Phew, for a minute there I thought you were going to dumb down the textures. Glad that's not the case :)
Thanks man for explaining that :D and good luck with this.
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