(UPDATE: I found a ripped Super Mario 3D Land character which was 3071 tris, so the rumored 2000 triangle limit is without a doubt false! I’m still glad it prompted me to research topology and polycount optimization, but now I’m at a complete loss as to what resolution to aim for! Please send help!)
Since I’m working towards ancient tech restraint limits, I thought I might as well attempt to make game graphics which would fit on the 3DS (now that Unity has 3DS support!).
However, people online seem to claim that the 3DS has a “hard limit” on 2000 triangles rendered at the same time, which is insanely little. For comparison, the PS1 developers usually aimed at 3000 triangle limits, although the machine could probably do a bit more. Some rumors say that the 2000 triangle limit is an artificial restraint, and it’s probable that it’s enforced to make sure that all games in the 3DS library runs at decent framerates, even with post-processing and fancy materials applied (implying that Nintendo doesn’t trust 3rd party devs to optimize their games properly). My graphics won’t be using post-processing at all, and shader materials will be unnecessary because I’m using vertex colours, so I’d love to swap that computing power for more triangles.Now, I’ve thought long and hard about how to solve this problem (and still retain a decent amount of detail and world-size).
First off, I looked at how the old classics did it.
andulkaphoto
germansingergirl
