I finished today the LODs for the Swadia Towns (Polished Buildings) and decided to make a quick test on how much improvement in FPS i will get.
It turned out quite nice, with LODs i will get an average of 5-6 FPS more in dense Townscenes when having lots of buildings in the view, this goes down to 1-2 FPS more when only some buildings are in the viewing range.
The downside is that i will have 10 Mb more Data to be loaded in the memory when using the LODs.
Afterall i am quite satisfied with the result, depending on settings (i used average quality settings for the test) this might be even a bigger difference.
I learned a lot during building the LODs and in future i can make the process much faster and more optimized.
The most i learned about using the freeware program “Balancer Lite”, which is a real handy tool for optimizing meshes in terms of polycount, how to prevent the geometry from collapsing/deforming too much and still have a quick workflow.
Marc Bielert 