quote:
Getting a good artist is not a problem, and sometimes i might need to put more than 50% of the world on the screen, but i don''t think that i really need to display the whole thing at once.

50% display ratio is a bit atypical for a 3D world. Do you really need to display all that ? Large scale isometric view ?

Anyway, if you have access to a good 3D artist, then you should target higher than 30k per world. I would go with 200k - 300k, that seems like a reasonable number for a GF2. But don''t over-tesselate your world either. Put the faces where it''s worth it: smooth surfaces, realistic organic objects (eg. characters), etc. If you don''t need more than 30k, then stay with 30k. But if using 100k will give you a much nicer, less blocky world, then use 100k.

About the coding: if you put everything in a VRAM cache (VAR extension), then you can easily get 50 to 60fps on a 300k world. Just be sure to have a decent hierarchical frustum culling algorithm, and some occlusion won''t hurt either.

/ Yann

Well, my terrain engine can cope with 8.4+ million faces in a landscape easily... ( on a GF4 Ti 4200 )... though no where near that are displayed at any one time, I think thats one of the major factors, the number of triangles displayed at any one time...

Death of one is a tragedy, death of a million is just a statistic.