So, with a normal map baked down, low poly for high detail level/map, what is a good number for current hardware for polygons? I want my game to be stable, and have a rich environment, so I was thinking lots of rooms, that are seperate scenes, but I do want to have some larger open spaces, help?
I have a great modeler working with me, and the “scene items” are very low poly, but there might be alot of them in a scene (50 items * (average of items-155 faces)) and some will be dynamic systems using collision etc,
another question, how many threads does the bge use? could some tasks be mapped to other threads?
The BGE is single-threaded. I do not think this will change soon. Nevertheless this is no option to increase performance right now. So you better have a look at topics where you can get performance increase (e.g. LOD, scene size, number of objects …)
You can use state-of-the art hardware to develop the game. I suggest to find a PC/Laptop with the lowest target hardware. Use this to run performance tests.
To see some performance facts, you can run performance tests before hand. E.g. how many visible and physical spheres can be processed without lagging etc. This should give you an idea where the limits are.