Quaxi,

Are you/have you/will you please working on a vertex and poly counter for the scan folder plugin?

This is a mess and we need help :(

Supposedly, last I heard Delphy was working on add the polygon and vertex counts to the scan files plugin, but it seemed like he was running into some problems. I'm not sure.

After reading the 800 vertices thumb rule, and then spending several hours going thru my dls, tossing 3/4s of the stuff. I went back to the MTS2 thread just about the time that RG et al were saying that 800 was a per tile and even that was too low and Brianne had crawled out of the woodwork (she always shows when she needs something :)) and that rule of thumb changed every few posts.....frustrating. I know everyone is struggling with this. Where ARE those Maxiod guys? Has anyone tried PMing them and asking them? And yes I know Brianne says Maxis said 800 vertices blah blah--But what if that's wrong--it can happen...

Well I don't think everyone should necessarily go throwing stuff out just yet. I mean some things are just too crazy high, like if you see something 10,000 plus, that's just too much. But there is so room for debate on items that are sort of moderate and aren't really low or really high.

I think the community needs to try to come up with some sort of rough guidelines for standard but I'm not sure it's going to happen. I guess the best a creator can do now IMO is check out the counts of a similar Maxis object and try not to go too terribly far off of that. But unless they post the Maxis count along side their's, the end user won't know that.

I keep meaning to do poly and vertex counts and all the Maxis stuff but honestly I just don't know if I am up for it because quite frankly it would be extremely tedious and time consuming to do having to clone and check every single item one by one, but if we could get the list of the counts for all the Maxis items we'd at least have something more tangible, real in game objects, to go by.

Really, all this crap should have been taken care of before hand IMO by the people who made the tools and the tutorials so those kind of objects wouldn't gotten made in the first place. Now they are already out in circulation and the damage is pretty much already done. A lot of people are just geting into making meshes the first time and they needed to know the whole story and all the information about what they should and shouldn't do and what kind of techniques they can use to get their counts down and also that it's not practical to go taking some super high poly stuff made for still renders and converting it to TS2. But if the people who made those meshes weren't given that information then how can we really blame them for doing it?

Instead the basically got a set of tools and a couple of tutorials on how to use those tools to get the meshes into the game, with no info on modeling for gaming, and it was like 'Well, here ya go'. Maybe the people that made those tools assumed the people making the meshes would be experienced and know what they are doing, but in most cases in this community that is NOT the case.

Pewrsonally, I'd rather see the actually counts over any ranges. And, to back that up, I will be checking each item dled from now on. Tedious, yes, but I'd rather do that then have a hog slip in unnoticed. Then spend hours and hours looking for it.

As I said in the MTS2 thread within my first few posts in it: we need to know what is acceptable for each item. I think that right now the best rule of thumb we have (I may be already behind here, it's changing so fast.... :() is the 1000 vertices/tile. But I only know what I've been told, having no real knowledge on this.

What did I need? :)

Anyway, there were lots other people in the room when the Maxis art department (art director and 5 or 6 modelers + 5 or 6 animators, and Tom, one of the programmers) said the 800 vert goal of theirs. Other people you can confirm with are Whitefolks from MTS2 (I think he was in the content group with us), Darkmatter and some other guy from DatGen, Thomas from TSR, SimMaster Ralph, etc.

Anyway, I wouldn't throw something out just because it's over 800. I prefer to think of it ranges like Inge said. Like around 800 counts as one Maxis item. 1600ish counts as 2. If you have a 20,000 count item that YOU as a downloader think is worth having an equivalent of 25 Maxis items in that house you can use it if YOU realize that it counts as 25 things and go sparingly on the rest of the decor.

Did this run into too many problems or is it still a possibility? I've got far too many downloads to want to look at poly/vertices counts 1 by 1. I'm sure I'm not the only one either. I'd help if I could, but this is beyond me. If there's something else - please ask.