Hey. I’ve created model of a staircase and I duplicated it and just connected between. It has over 2000 tris so I wanted to ask is this too much for a single object for game development?
The answer is: it depends of your game.
For a PC game it’s nothing. For a mobile phone it can already be too much. For a single level with just the stairs it’s nothing. For a level with thousands of this stairs it can already be too much.
Polycount is not the issue really. And i wouldn’t worry about a stairs with a thousand tris. Modern PC games deals with polycounts in megapoly range just fine. The issue is the performance. When your game crawls down to unplayable, then you have to optimize it somewhere. This can be the polycount. But the real performance bottlenecks are most of the times at other areas. Materials, shaders, physics calculations, draw calls, etc. .
Every game is different here. And that’s why there is no other way than to simply test it out. Prototyping 
Okay so this model should be okay. I plan to make a map with simple objects. Nothing too big when talking about polycount. Most of the objects will be low poly and I won’t use any materials I think. Only hand painted textures I guess so I hope it will all be okay.
Thanks Tiles for your help!
EDIT: So this part of the model is taking large amount of polys:
72 cylinders, every talking 28 tris = 2016 tris.
I don’t know should I lower the amount of verticies on the cylinders. It’s currently at 10 verticies.
It’s currently at 10 verticies.
10 is too much. 4 sided rectangular post without the cap is fine. If you really want to save polycount, traditional gaming scene will be created using alpha texture for stair baluster.
Also, when it comes to PC and mobile games, it also depends on whether you’re going to target high-end hardware or target compatibility with lower-end devices.
For lower-end targeting, you will have to make it look low-poly (ie. you can actually pick out the individual polygons in the object). You also need to be sure to omit all details that aren’t going to be visible to the player at any time.
Okay, so alpha texture will make stair baluster look rounded and good even though it has 4 sides? Sorry I have never worked with alpha textures so I don’t know how to use them or where.
Delete all unnecessary edge loops, especially the ones on the railing, make all the posts rectangular, or at least 5-sided. If you want to use really high-poly stuff, learn what LOD (level of detail) meshes are and how to use them. Use smooth shading on the posts to make them look round even if you have a low number of polygons. You can even make a square look round in some cases.
2000 is generally fine, but usually not for a staircase unless your game is mainly for gaming rigs or modern PCs, you generally want to reserve higher poly counts for items the player will have the most interaction with, such as the player’s character and such.