Well, to respond to you all (beginning with fireside), I recently ditched my 4MB 2XAGP card when I found out that my motherboard limits AGP transfer to 1MB (hence my incredibly low framerates). Instead, I’m using the on-board 4MB graphics card in 16-bit color mode. On my old card, I probably would have gotten 3.5 fps on this crate (static). However, I get 45 fps on it with the card I’m using now for one static crate. Just for fun, I tried 36 crates set to Rigid Body, No Sleeping and I got about 20 fps.
As for OTO’s main character comment, I quote spike from his Bullet Effect thread:
He also mentioned planning to have 50-75 dynamic crates on screen at a time. By comparison, I don’t think I’m doing that bad with approximately 300 triangles per crate.
I realize the crate is not as low poly as could be. Some of the additional polygons arose because of how I wanted to texture it (the crate I had before I did subdivisions for texturing was 138 faces, probably the same crate geomis got from manually lowering face count). As I said, I would change some things if I were to use it in a game. I would probably bake the textures from the crate, then bring it down as low poly as possible and re-apply it.
Anyway, thanks for the comments (and especially the compliments on the textures). BTW, bookeater, you put me to shame with your excellent modelling skills.