Oh, a few things I should probably mention... It seems I always hear talk and afterward roll my eyes as people always made mention of how "high" the polycounts are in Half-Life 2, spouting out such numbers as 50,000 polys per character and other such nonsense. Having finally played the game, it's obviously not true. From what I can tell, the characters are perhaps closer to 5-8,000 polys. And many of the environments were lower poly than I would have thought also. It didn't detract from the experience in any shape or form.

I can understand the confusion, though. HL2, like many newer games (including the one I'm working on) makes use of normal maps. These are made by creating high-res geometry and then baking that down into a normal map for use on low-res geometry. And yes, the high-res models, I can obviously see being 50k or even 500k poly models with no problem. However, the models IN THE GAME are not this high.

I'm sure most of you (those that even care) know this already, but it gets on my nerves sometimes when people spout all these technologically impossible numbers.

Even so, it wouldn't hurt any of you planning on getting into games to brush up both hi-res and lo-res skills, as I don't see this going away for a while.