David Zipper · Senior Weapon Artist

We need to trick it a little bit so we don't have too many polygons. So the top round is usually modeled completely. And the one under it has a little bit less detail than the top one. And if you go even deeper into the magazine, you maybe even have a cylinder with the red stripes. So if you have a glimpse from the side... in this case, you can still see it pretty well. But on some magazines, the shadow is actually taking away the detail anyway, so you can use less detail the deeper you go in.

Cory Bamford · Lead Prop Artist

Yeah. Things like grenade launchers and such, where all the, well, not bullets, but rounds are visible, they'd have to be modeled in. But in terms of the capacity and stuff, that's stored as a value somewhere, so they're kind of there, but sometimes they're not drawn.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

You do what you've got to do to squeeze every ounce of performance where you can.

David Zipper · Senior Weapon Artist

That's true for most video games, I think, or at least it should be. Yeah, even though we use more polygons, the workflow we do is still optimized quite a bit. We're not using a heavy load of textures, like Cory said before, which, in some cases, if you use a 2,000x2,000 resolution or 4,000x4,000, you can easily get to 100 megabytes per weapon. And if we have 100 weapons in-game, it gets too heavy and we had to think about ways of reducing it. And our workflow with the custom normals is really scalable. You can use it on weapons, you can use it on buildings. It doesn't really matter what you do with it, it all works. That's why it's so strong, in my opinion.

Cory Bamford · Lead Prop Artist

The scalability is really important, especially for props, for instance, where you have an absolutely obscene amount of them. We want them to look good, we want them to have a lot of detail, and we also want them to be fairly cheap.