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[Toady One]

That other thread was getting too long for my poor modem...

I'm now culling the models of offscreen creatures -- this is a major improvement, since you could get up to 40K triangles from offscreen leprechauns.  Later on I'll add progressive creature meshes to complete this optimization.  Then creature models should be mostly negligible, except when you are getting smashed by a horde of titans -- your frame rate will only matter for a few seconds in that case

The nicest thing however are some new landscape progressive landscape modes I put in. Before we had "full" and "progressive meshes".  Now we also have:

Trashy:  Makes the far away land patches even more abstract (2 triangles instead of the full 64 -- progressive was 32).  This makes cracks in between the full and progressive patches though.

Beyond Trashy:  Far away patches are 2 triangles, and NEAR patches are cut to 32.  Aside from the cracking this also makes you occasionally dip into the ground a bit, since the textures now only approximate the actual ground.

Abusive Night Soil:  Makes all patches 2 triangles.  All of the cracks suddenly disappear (except those in towns).  Everything seems nice, except for occasional dipping into the ground.  The worst part of this will come later in development of the game -- if you only use 2 triangles to describe a patch, very small terrain features (like spiked pits and cave entrances) disappear completely.

So what's the upside of these trashy modes?  Here it is:

Regular View Triangles (not counting any creature models):
Full: 6144
Prog: 3456
Trsh: 2616
BTrs: 696
AbNS: 96

First Person View Triangles (not counting any creature models):
Full: 5120
Prog: 3008
Trsh: 2348
BTrs: 620
AbNS: 80

Top Down View Triangles (not counting any creature models):
Full: 15616
Prog: 3904
Trsh: 244
BTrs: 244
AbNS: 244

This should help speed problems on many computers  Even abusive night soil mode seems very playable now (it even looks good, this is essentially about how many triangles first-person shooters use) -- I'll have to make some tweaks to make it playable once I add caves.

This doesn't completely fix the triangle count problem.  Adding those progressive creature meshes I mentioned above will help, but there are also building models -- you'll find that even in AbNS mode and no creature models, your triangle count pops back up to a few thousand when you are in a town.  This is simply because I haven't written up simple building models yet.

[Toady One]

The triangle counts include ~300 triangles from the player model.