Valve Game Asset Polycounts: Left 4 Dead 2 and Half Life 2

enemjay

Newcomer
I've been searching around for awhile looking for examples of polycounts from
Left4Dead 2 assets. I've seen alot of posts concerning tris and polygons for weapons and player character models but haven't found anything about other assets.

Gas cans, Propane tanks, furniture (chairs couches), static vehicles, common undead. Anyone have any info on these.

Also for vehicles in motion like those from HL2: the buggy, combine gun car, gunship and the insectoid drop ship - how many polys or tris do they have. The combine gun ship which you face off against in the canals moves around so much so it must have a pretty low count (it looks that way too). About the insectoid dropship - in HL2, I don't think you even see one up close however in Ep.1 you shoot one down right thought the roof. I remember that thing being pretty gorgeous to look at. My guess is that there are two different models. One for the combat and another for the crash corpse.
 
You should be able to capture those games with Pix and just look yourself...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PIX_(Microsoft)

A version of it is in Visual Studio 2012 (professional only?) but an older version that works on most pre DX11.1 games is included in the last DirectX SDK for free. June 2010 release here:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=6812

In Pix (or any of the equivalents) you can record any frame and then step through how it's built up. For example, you can step through the draw calls and watch as each object appears on the screen. When the object you care about appears you just need to click on the draw call and it will tell you how many primitives are being drawn, etc.
 
Ok I finally got around to downloading the application but before I try it I wanna make sure that either Steam wont interfere or that it wont perceive PIX as some hacking attempt and blacklist my account.

Are there any steps I need to take prior to using PIX in L4D2?
 
No guarantees - I wouldn't recommend using it on multiplayer games just in case.

That said I've used it to investigate many games through my steam account with no ill effects. I use it when I can't be bothered to intercept calls directly or as a sanity check that my tools work ok. Pix works better on DX9/10 games than DX11. There's also usually some messing around getting it to attach to the right thing (i.e. if there's a loading screen or launcher for the game that spawns the game in a new window you often have to tell it not to attach to the first process but skip a couple until you find the one you want).

I'd recommend trying it on something simple first just to find your way around the tool. If you've downloaded the DirectX SDK to get Pix then you already have a load of simple SDK examples included which you can run/record and have no steam/loading screen complications. Work out how to record those and there's not much more to it to make it work with any game.

There's no simple tutorial that will work for all games on steam. Basically when you can do it on a simple exe you have to find the steam launcher combination to run the program directly (that info is usually in the desktop shortcut the game creates).
 
Back
Top