Just wondering how many polys are too many? I am trying to redo my mesh as Bob's Track Builder is very messy. Thanks!!
Theoretically, there is no maximum. In practice, you'll probably want to split up your Terrain so all of it isn't being drawn all the time, no matter which way you look. Probably a good starting point is to split it up roughly into quarters, or pieces of about 10-20K triangles. But those are just really rough guesses--it's best to try some tests with different sized slices on computers with different hardware (if you're looking to distribute to a wide audience).
Theoretically, there is no maximum. Indeed. It depends. Especially for terrain it heavily depends from where it is visible, and if it's a track where you can view terrain from a long ways off (like Fuji with it's long straight or mountains to the north), other considerations than poly count come into play (for Fuji again: I had to increase the distance of the far clipping plane by quite a lot, which had a knock-on effect on performance due to the sim having to check/render objects further away that were quickly discarded before). Polys are generally fairly cheap. There's some kinds that are more expensive, depending on the shader they use. Reflective ones (cube map or live reflector) are fairly expensive. RealRoad is fairly expensive (on the CPU-side, especially if not split into smaller chunks), but requires a certain poly density to work properly. My short answer would be: As many as you can afford, as few as you need. Don't waste polys but don't hesitate to spend a few more if it gives a good visible improvement. From the screenshot of Lakeside from your other thread I'd say that's much more than you need. From my point of view you could easily do with using only a quarter the number of the polys on that terrain mesh than you have there (so that four of the squares you have now were just one poly). Perhaps even further of an reduction to an eigth or sixteenth would still do. If I were you I'd go for les polys step by step and see at which point the visual quality of the terrain starts to go noticably (!) lower and work from there.
