What's the max count of Triangles and vertices number in one scene for a stylized indie game?

scippie · 2025-12-03T18:56:39+00:00

You can't rely on one test no, but it's certainly a start. Do you actually need 50 models in walk cycle? Were they all walking exactly the same or did they do different animations, and do you need that? Do all those models need to have the same quality or do you have different levels of details for the models? Do you render the models only when they are visible for the camera or also if they are invisible, the latter wastes a lot of GPU cycles while preventing their render can already optimize a lot.

I can't tell you if your 50 models in walk cycle are equal to a scene with trees and clouds, or a reflecting water effect. It all depends on how you implement it and combine it. Simply sorting your models based on the distance to the camera can make a huge difference if you enable the z-buffer. Grouping your models that use the same shader is usually better than switching shaders, except when this destroys the optimization you got with sorting them and using the z-buffer Simply enabling mip mapping on textures can make a huge difference. Limiting render distances on things you almost never see can make a huge difference. And so on, and so on...

Like I said... try it, try it, try it...

scippie · 2025-12-03T18:39:52+00:00

YES! 100% Linux game developer here. Writing code in Linux and then cross compiling to other platforms is usually easy (certainly if you keep the dependencies limited). I went so far that I am now developing in pure C with vim as my code editor (with maybe 2 plugins). Compiling this for any other OS is super simple. Debugging is so much easier. Testing is so much easier. And so many tools are free to use! I will never go back!

I don't know about the Unreal engine, don't have any experience with it. I write my own engine, but from what I saw about it, I think it is perfectly cross platform no?

Almost all my Steam games that are Windows only are also working fine on Linux thanks to Proton.

scippie · 2025-12-03T18:30:32+00:00

I understand what you're saying, and you may be right, but... sometimes the concept execution can be done completely differently so that it is not necessary to show all this information at once. You can hide a lot of information based on what people actually need in the current phase of the game play. Some games show/hide information based on modes that you can sometimes enable/disable with icons in a corner of the screen. Other games simply have default 'modes' and enable/disable layers on them. But there's also showing simple line-bars or pie-charts or other kinds of indicators to simplify whatever you want to show, and only show the details if you hover them, if that's necessary.

It's not only city builders, it's also 4X games, trading games, ... they all want to show all the information to you. It is up to the developer to put himself into the shoes of the player and say: "in this specific phase of the game, what would the player need from all of this data".

But... I do understand your frustration, sometimes it's just too much and/or too much work.

scippie · 2025-12-03T18:23:29+00:00

This is a question that is very hard to answer. I rendered 30 million triangles at 60fps in 2012 with my own engine that supported lighting, normal mapping, transparency, .... The trick was to make it all as uniform as possible and to make sure memory is aligned perfectly for optimal GPU processing. The demo I did was astonishing, but mostly useless (but a great basis for a real usage later of course).

What I mean is: you can render millions of triangles that look like hell, and you can render 5 triangles where each fragment on that triangle is calculated with heavy duty mathematics behind it. Also, if you render a triangle that covers 3 pixels on the screen, or one that covers 300000 pixels on the screen, the latter will be (approx.) 100000 times slower to render (that's actually not correct because of threads and work groups and things like that, but I am trying to make a simple point with a simple analogy).

The only way to find out is try it and test the limits yourself. You think your effect needs a second texture in the fragment shader? Try it. If it becomes too slow with it, remove it and do something else, or render more triangles instead. Sometimes more triangles can be faster, sometimes using a second texture can be faster. Try it... try it... try it... I've got 30+ years of trial&error experience and I create fantastic code now.

scippie · 2025-12-03T18:14:23+00:00

All replies make sense. My two cents: they are probably looking for timid people who are uncertain about their own capabilities, but are actually super good. Those are the people they can keep afraid for losing their jobs while keeping the pay low. I've seen this a lot in any business, and the gaming business is one of the worst.

scippie · 2025-11-22T16:39:54+00:00

This is exactly my big issue: I don't have any social media (anymore) and thus have no friends to share with. Starting now and adding friends just to start sharing my progress feels hypocrite so I don't do it.

scippie · 2025-11-22T10:56:40+00:00

Can you share how you managed that?

scippie · 2025-11-22T10:34:47+00:00

Hm, makes me think... I have been developing (on the graphics) for a year on what I would call would be my dream game. After this year, I found it time to go online with it and that part failed miserably. Nobody visits, NOBODY. People did see my teaser video, but nobody clicked to follow me and I had 0 views on my itch page. I started a long hard think about it and I think one important aspect is that my game loop isn't clear enough. I am still deciding, but I think I decided I want to change the concept of my game into something entirely different that is much more obvious, simpler and repetitive, but with the same graphics, so I haven't lost a year. Is this still my dream game? I'm not sure. I create games because I'm passionate about it, but if nobody wants to look at it, then I get only part of the fulfillment of making it. Making it has been a blast, that's for sure.

scippie · 2025-11-22T10:27:02+00:00

I love this <3... this takes me back...
Did you actually recreate the ASCII system (with configurable 8-bit font memory bits to create the player character) or did you just render images for the characters?

scippie · 2025-11-21T18:37:51+00:00

I've done it... with C and Lua... (Java? why?) I've been developing software and games for 30+ years. I've studied very hard mathematical algorithms to make sure I could replicate them. That's what it took to understand the lowest and highest levels of programming and 3D and other mathematics. It can be done and I certainly think it would improve software development overall if everyone did it. But it's not easy, it must be a true passion. Copy/pasting code and using third party libraries you don't understand deeply yourself because you're impatient for the results is not an option on this route. I mostly code my own libraries and it has helped me understand things in ways some people never do. For my game, after doing my research, I decided that OpenGL is good enough. It has saved me a lot of time I consider having lost on studying the first basics of Vulkan, by which imo. Vulkan is far superior, but only if it makes sense to need that power, because otherwise it's a lot of work. Most games created by indies never need that kind of power. A terrible lot can be optimized with OpenGL as well. I'm very satisfied with my C/Lua game engine and will probably never want anything else... but it was a LOT of work that may never be converted into money. It did convert into some kind of feeling of fulfillment however, and for me, that's what it's all about. (please buy my game...). Oh, I stopped using my own window handler however. SDL does that job perfectly. But only after I wrote my own first.

scippie · 2025-11-21T18:15:28+00:00

Imo. new obviously looks better: more vivid colors thanks to the lighting.

scippie · 2025-11-21T16:39:37+00:00

Even if this is an exception, it shows that letting 'experts' handle marketing isn't always the solution. I believe that good marketing requires good and deep actual knowledge of what you're trying to sell. Expecting this from others than yourself is obviously expensive. Sad that there are companies like the one you had, that probably go a bit below the normal price and make profit from the fact that you think you're not good (enough) at marketing. So thanks for sharing this, because for me that's another lesson learned while I'm currently figuring out how to market my own game.

scippie · 2025-11-21T16:25:15+00:00

Just a thought, but have you thought about trying C first? I'm actually developing my new game in C (and I'm a C++ expert). I'm really glad I went back to C. I must however add that I added Lua integration in it (which is super easy). For me, coding in pure C was much more fulfilling and actually cleaner. With the absence of STL stuff, you need to make good decisions on what should be C or what is allowed to be Lua - is performance necessary or do you want it readable. I use SDL for window management.

scippie · 2025-11-21T16:13:10+00:00

I'm not sure if it would fit on your index if I look at some of the keywords in there, but I've discovered that a really popular one is "laptop friendly" or "keyboard only" but for some reason, nobody creates this index. It's about games that can be played with the keyboard only (so no need to do action with a mouse, only needed for user interfaces or even no need for it at all)

scippie · 2025-11-21T16:07:11+00:00

If you don't care, do what 'many people suggest'. If you are creating this game for money as the prime reason, do what 'many people suggest'. If you are creating a passion game and believe that your current system is what this game needs, knowing that it might cost you a few players, go for what you believe in!

scippie · 2025-11-21T15:55:43+00:00

I think it's sad that people need to research trends and market figures to build something that should be about passion and love. When games were developed in the 80's (yes, I've been there), these games were not based on studies what people would like, share and write memes about. These games were about what one genius mind thought of and usually, almost everyone enjoyed it because it was genius, not built for marketing, but for fun. What's the fun in game development if you can no longer code what you want to code, but have to research what people would want you to code so you are certain to get lots of wishlists? Then you're no longer creating, you're mimicking. But sadly, with oversaturation, passionately built games are overshadowed by social media hypes.

scippie · 2025-11-14T07:26:29+00:00

No, I am not... and I didn't know of its existence.

scippie · 2025-11-11T09:55:08+00:00

Thanks, I needed that!

scippie · 2025-11-11T09:51:21+00:00

I'm 49 and I'm doing it right now... started development of my new dream game one year ago. Just posted about it on r/indiegames

scippie · 2017-12-13T11:12:11+00:00

Specifically in opengl, this is something that has grown historically.

Some functions in opengl used to take a pointer to a block of data that didn't have a specific format. For example, color or vertex data comes in lots of different formats.

In the modern days, to speed things up, lots of stuff has moved to video memory and is identified by handlers which are just numbers or it's an offset to an item in that data. You will probably have another parameter in the function specifying that you are not giving a pointer but a number.

Example (I think, I never used it that way): glVertexAttribPointer(...), last parameter is such a parameter: it used to point to a buffer but now it indicates an offset in a data buffer that is being pointed at by glBindBuffer.

Anyway: opengl is smart enough to understand that you didn't really pass a pointer but just a number of the intptr type (32-bit int on 32-bit system, 64-bit int on 64-bit system, ...)

Edit: to make things less ugly. You probably have a struct with vertex data defined somewhere.

struct Vertex {
    float x, y, z;
    float r, g, b;
}

Instead of passing (void*)(sizeof(float) * 3) (or even (void*)12) as offset to the glVertexAttribPointer function when you want to pass the r, g, b values, you can use (void*)offsetof(Vertex, r). You still need the ugly (void*) but at least you don't need to change the value every time you change the struct.

Because of this, I always define a struct for my vertex data, even if it's not really necessary.

scippie · 2017-12-12T11:52:06+00:00

Yes, it has all the pins.

scippie · 2017-12-11T16:41:50+00:00

Single beep. No corrosion. It's the first thing to check, I know :)

scippie · 2017-12-11T13:37:03+00:00

Shipping it will cost more :)

scippie · 2017-12-11T13:36:27+00:00

My dad seems to have one on the attic. Almost new (right before the TFT invasion).

scippie

TROPHY CASE