As a downloader of I assume some of these high poly objects it very hard to know what is high poly and what isn't. I work in 3d alot.. Some objects its obvious they are low or high, but others it can be decieving and hard to judge.

I wish people would also post the poly count on stuff they create so we can make up our own minds, not just here but on all sites that offer new meshes (i know some people do).

Some meshes that look very simple can sometimes be very high in poly's if they have chosen to subdivide the mesh to give a smoother result.

I have noticed that the bed catagory in game now takes an age to open up.... I think it may be the Brass beds I got from here as they do look rather high poly, I could be wrong though.

I have noticed a general slow down of the game since UNI and since I started downloaded all these fabulous new meshes. I noticed ingame, the grass outside and the sims clothing is degrading to an ikky blur, where before it used to stay crisp all the way through hours of game play... Could this be high-poly mesh related?

Anyhoo.. i'll stop rambling now.... Thanks for bringing this up, it definitley needs to be addressed.

-Xi-
xXx

PS. wouldn't it be good if there were a little plug in for SimPE that could scan your downloaded new mesh items and tell you if they are over a bench mark of XXX poly's - that way we could take them out if we choose.

Well said, I just went through and added vert/poly information to all my downloads.

In Blender, the vertices and faces that are selected are listed at the top right of the screen. Ve == Vertex count, Fa == Face/Poly count.

me again. i just looked through my objects folder where i put all my new mesh objects.. and typed in the search BED and OMG I was gasping at the file sizes.. one of them is over 15mb!!... this surely isn't good.. Most of them top the 3mb size, but quite a few are over 10mb.... me thinks, i shall have to try and delete them all.

If I delete them from the folder and they are being used ingame, what will happen, will the game substitute a default bed or will that house crash.... I hate to think I have to go through each house and delete all beds...

Again.. i wish there was a prog that could tell you what is likely to be high poly...

Thanks for listening to me prattle on.... lol

-Xi-

EDIT: I just did a file size search of my new objects folder, showing me all new meshes that are over 1mb.. and wow there are quite a number of them are HUGE, over 5mb a pop, a few are larger still.... Hmm now how to go about deleting them, i'm not sure if they are being used... hmm any help greatly appreciated.

Brianna, I definitely was not referring to those creators who are on my low poly list with that statement, but maybe I didn't make that very clear? I did find in checking A LOT of the meshes out there though that plants and small decorative items were some of the WORST offenders in terms of high poly counts.

And I completely agree about the alpha channels. The game engine allows them and Maxis makes use of them so we should too! I actually posted a comparison later in my low poly list thread between two similar looking plants, one from 4Eversimfantasy that was very high, and one from Boblishman from here that was very low because he used alpha channels. To look at them in the game, they really don't look all that different, yet the difference between the numbers is dramatic.

In going through and poly counting all my custom object downloads, there were a few really high ones that I liked and wanted to keep so I ran them through an optimize modifier in 3D Studio Max and was able to get the counts way down on them to the point I felt I could live with them. The vast majority of these high polygon meshes are unnecessarily so.

Xianah: Do you have any of those Ellis meshes. Get rid of anything from them. They are by far the worst offender of peddling super high poly meshes. I swear I think the people on that site would find a way to make a flat one sided square high poly! *shakes head*

Thx a lot for your information.

I 'm a begginer into meshing, and i will be careful now.
I will now try to learn about Alpha channels !!!

For those who don't have a 3D program, if you want to quickly check the vertex count of an object you can get that straight from SimPE.

Open the package file and select the Geometric Data Container (GMDC). This is the mesh. The package might have more than one. Usually you just need to check the first one listed.

At the bottom of the screen, click the Plugin View tab, and you'll see a screen that shows several new tabs. Click the tab that says Items 2.

On the left there's a box labeled Unknown Items 2, like in my attached picture. Click on the numbers in that box. That will put the numbers into the boxes to the right of it. The top one is labled Vertex Count.

It's a hex number, and unless you know how to read it (I don't) you'll need to convert it to a normal decimal, so select and copy it. Click the Tools menu and then "Hex <-> Dec Converter" which will open the small converter window you see in my screenshot. Paste the number into the top box in the converter and a normal number will appear under it. That number is the vertex count for the mesh. The one I was looking at (part of the Maxis snowman) has 267 vertices.

Hope this is helpful to someone. OK, back into hiding with me. I'm trying to stay away from the site for the weekend, but I really suck at it.

EDIT: Xi, a big file size doesn't necessarily mean a high poly mesh. The textures used for a bed are very big normally, and the texture compresses less than a mesh. If there are recolors included in the mesh package, the majority of the file size will be from the textures. If the creator uses alpha channels as described by Brianna and Motoki, the texture sizes will be even bigger, yet the mesh will be smaller.

RG

I was thinking and ask Quaxi if he could create a little plugin for the scan tool to add the Vertex Count feature: so we could spot the "monsters" without having to check them individually...

thanks I thought that it might be the textures.. but yeah a plug in would be soooo incredibly helpful. As I just fired up the game to remove items from houses before i delete them from the downloads folder and lost interest after the 8th house in 1 neighbourhood... LOL

Can I just delete them from the download folder, even if some of the meshes are in use in the game? What will happen, will that house crash or??

And yup I have quite a lot of stuff from that russian site, which took me about 100 years to download.. LOL... but actually i don't use them, so I have deleted them.

I really hope we can make people more 'mesh aware' and to realise high poly is mostly unessessary and although some objects look very pretty, slow downs and blurry textures as a result is not something i am willing to put up with... After all since the game play of TS2 is so infectous, pretty high poly meshes are a secondary concern. They can still look excellent if the mesh is reduced i'm sure!! Just nabbing a premade mesh from 3dcafe or somewhere and putting in a game, is really not good, as its been said these are for static rendering programs like Poser, not for moving animated games. Doesn't matter how powerful your PC is, after a while those highpoly meshes will drag the game down, to where it unenjoyable to play.

Anyhoo.... thanks for starting this thread.... lets get it out there and make the creators 'Mesh Aware'
Its such a shame to have to delete all these delicious items...

-Xi-
xXx

Xianah, maybe you can just remove the files to another folder on your desktop, check if your houses crash, then if they do, put them back and delete them from the houses manually then remove them. Please let me know what happens I was thinking the same thing today, but my game loads up in half an hour now, maybe you could be my guide to whether it's safe

BTW, I'm off to get simellis's objects out until something is done about them...

RGiles: Oh *slaps head* it's in hex. No wonder the numbers I was getting in SimPE were so off! Some of the ones I was looking at didn't have letters and I just assumed they were decimal. :o

I read Motoki's reply about the Ellis site the other day. I was definitely dissapointed (I have a lot of the Ellis Dls, and they are beautiful, but not worth it if I can't play the game!) and took them all out. I have noticed the past few weeks that my game has started crashing...a LOT. Never did before, always had a smooth game, never crashed and rarely a slow down (except for the Goth's house, but I remedied that by deleting the ghosts when they came out at night that caused the slow down on that lot). And I know what "wave bed" someone else was talking about. And I have that one, too. I hope they fix the wave bed, I was planning on using that one on one of my lots, what a shame.

Thanks for your post the other day Motoki. And thanks to everyone else for this thread. Now I know what the problem is. I also have an excellent graphics card and noticed my grass, and my sim's custom clothes looking blurry even though they look beautifully done on the site. Time to start deleting, I guess.

BTW, after I deleted all my Ellis stuff, I was worried about crashing on the lots that had all their stuff on it. It was replaced with a Maxis objects. Don't know if it will happen the same for everyone, but that's what happened to me when I deleted things that were being used.

Just so everyone is clear here, vertex count is not all that important, and that's what my original problem with Maxis statement was. It's the face count that really matters. Some of my objects may have twice as many vertices as they do faces so that's no indication. As Miche has previously stated it's the faces that matter.

Brasstex

Thanks for posting this Delphy, now I FULLY understand what a polygon is.

Brasstex: I agree to some extent, but I also think from a users point of view looking at the vertex count in SimPE might be better than not being able to get any count at all. I mean, if you look at the GDMC and the vertex count is 20,000 I think it's a safe bet the poly and face count is also pretty crazy.

As for creators sticking to the 800, well I still kind of think a better indicator might be to just find the most comparable Maxis mesh, poly count it and use it as a rough guideline. It's a place to start at least.

This should always happen, that a deleted object on a lot will default to something else because when you clone the objects in SimPE, the package still references the original Maxis' object GUID to fall back on. In some cases you might get your object replaced with something odd, like if you delete a rug you may end up with a statue in it's place, but you should always end up with something in it's place and deleting an object that is currently used on your lots should not cause any crashing.

I'd like to hear what Delphy or someone else with more game engine experience has to say about the verts vs polygons question, because I'm not so sure you're right, Brasstex.

Some of the maxis objects have faces that would never be visible to the user. Are hidden faces rendered by the game engine? In my objects I deleted all hidden faces, even though it usually didn't reduce vertex count. Did it make a difference?

The game renders the polys, but it uses a vertex buffer. Every vertex is stored in memory. So I'd take it that if there are a high number of verts, but far fewer polygons you don't have a slow render problem but you do have a memory problem.

I think the game must render hidden faces (though I would definitely appreciate a definite answer on this) because when I turn object hiding on it makes a noticable increase in gameplay speed for me even though most of those objects on the other floors are obscured with walls and floors and such when object hiding is off.

I'm mainly based my info on what was conveyed to me by Miche, whom I trust on this matter as much as anyone. Also, some of my objects like a couple of my body meshes, have approximately 4000 vertices and may go as high as 6000 polys, so it's just not a really good determinate. I like the idea of creators being honest and just posting some agreed upon statistics in their threads.

Brasstex

Yeah, I just meant that you mentioned mine in the sentence:



So I wanted to explain how I did it so others can make low-poly flowers as well.

I think a vertex count in SimPE would be great. And maybe the mesh tool could comment as well. In most cases your faces will be about twice what your vertices are. If you have low vertices, your poly count usually can't be more than about twice that. (you need at least 3 verts to make a face, and even with most faces sharing verts - I don't think I've ever seen something with many times more polys than verts - I'll do some checking, but point one out if you can I'd love to be wrong). Vert count is the standard Maxis modelers go by. I don't know why, but they do. There's about 12 of them and they work with the engine designers -- I just assume they know something we don't.

I definitely agree with that. Right now if the creator doesn't post their counts the end user has to jump through hoops to try and get it. Hopefully, at some point there will be some kind of tool that the users can get that information easily in without having to open a 3D editor or convert hex code or any of that mess.

Thanks for all this info! I had been seeing poly counts in some new item posts, and while I knew *roughly* what that was about, and that more polygons=slower rendering, I didn't have any idea at all what to look for as decent benchmarks. Was 100 polygons too much? 1000? 10000? I had no idea.

Now I've got a good idea, I'm more aware of the severity of the effect on game play, and I'm much better educated on how polygons and meshes actually "work". My 'vague idea' has become a much more precise understanding. w00t!

OK. My counts are now posted on my site. I also had an end table with twice the Maxis rec. vertices that is marked with a warning. Hopefully others will do the same, whether they're posting at MTS2 or elsewhere.

(I didn't do all the plain upper cabs since they're almost exactly what the matching Maxis base is -- I guess I should do those anyway.)

I still need a little clarification as to the difference between a vertex and a polygon. I think this is what it is...please correct me if i'm wrong .....According to CT Nutmeggers display, are the dots the vertices and the lines polygons?

Well, polys aren't "showing in CT Nutmeggers display: polys are the triangles formed between the dots.