Do you have a hard poly limit you have to keep in mind when making a prop?
TL;DRThere's no single hard limit stated; props use more triangles than typical games thanks to their normal-map approach, with detail judged by closeness to the player's camera and helped by streaming and culling.
That is a very good question. Putting it plainly, our pipeline is a little bit different from some other games, where we use a... You've probably heard it spoken about, the custom normal pipeline. Essentially, we don't actually bake a normal map for every single individual object. A normal map is a way of transferring details from a piece of geometry with a high triangle count to a lower triangle count. We just use bent normals on the edges of chamfers to replicate that smoothing. So we have a higher triangle count than what games typically do because of that. But it also means that we have less of a texture footprint as well. So our triangle counts are, I would say for an asset like this, take the hot dog for instance. I'll tell you how many triangles it is. It is 1,300 triangles. This guy's probably coming in way high at the moment because that's just a little debug. This guy's like 24,000 triangles, which is very high. I would probably say I would be happy with like...
I don't know if that was a good answer, but yeah, triangle counts. We try to set ourselves limits. However, we try and think about an asset relative to the player's camera rather than the actual size of the object. So we may have an object like this Big Benny's noodle box that someone picks up and puts in their face. We want to put as much detail in as we can relative to how close it is to the camera, right? So we'll actually put quite a lot of detail into those smaller assets because of that. Whereas in a lot of video games, you see the props and they're like, oh, we can only make this like 10 triangles, so it has to look a bit sad.
We also utilize things like object streaming and culling and stuff like that. So it allows us to have higher poly, higher fidelity items in there because we're much better about getting it out of memory when you don't need it. Well, getting there anyway.
With the server-side object container stuff as well.
We already got it with client-side, it already does a whole bunch of that.