Hmmm... which is better?

[boblishman]

I was just wondering ... which is better object design for the plasma engine (i.e. user performance in the game) :

(all objects use the same (single) texture)

a) One object with 10,000 faces

or

b) 50 objects with 200 faces

or

c) makes no different

[andylegate]

Let me tell you about it in Blender, not Plasma.

Justin had some bookshelves with books on them. The bookshelves had over 500 faces on them. there were then 59 bookshelves.
Setting the objects to be displayed in the Blender 3D window for Wire, my poor little computer with its 512MB of Ram was almost locked up.

Nadnerb took the shelves and reduced the faces way down to 20 someodd faces. I then turned around and duplicated that book shelf 58 times.

Even in Textured mode, I was able to navigate around without a care in the world.

So I would have to say, in Blender at least, the more faces a single object has, the hard your computer has to work. So to me, at least, it would be better to have less faces period.

Now, would it have still lagged badly in Uru? I would think so. But I'm not an expert.

[Trylon]

More objects with less vertices is better.

That way, the engine can choose not to render objects that are out of view.
If everything is stored in one object, the engine has to render the whole object at any time, regardless of what is in view

[Chacal]

Make sure you don't set collisions on those objects. Rather use one big invisible collider with as few faces as possible.

[boblishman]

More objects with less vertices is better.

That way, the engine can choose not to render objects that are out of view.
If everything is stored in one object, the engine has to render the whole object at any time, regardless of what is in view

ahhh ... that is the answer I was looking for ... Thank you!

[Aloys]

As a side note: that is also true for large objects like landscapes. Rather than have one single continuous 20.000 faces terrain, it's a good idea to cut it down into several objects.
[/side note]