guys, I'm curious which way to go here. I'm making a POW camp map so a large part of the map is going to be surrounded by fencing. currently I have a very nice model (thanks wt) of some barbed wire across the top, but I don't want this to kill the frame rate. using a barbed wire texture wouldn't look near as good, but if I am taking a big hit on frame rate, I'd rather allocate those resources somewhere else. here is a pic of a small section of the fence so that you can see what I'm talking about.
http://josh.whatsupslc.com/map/rogans_fence1.jpg

basically I'm asking, how do models effect the engine in online play? can I have craploads of them like this with no problems, or am I better off with brushes and textures?

BTW, I know the textures on the building, ect..aren't right. they are just placeholders while I am building the brushes. :D

Models are counted as entity polygons (epoly), and the HL1-engine can handle much more of those than world polygons. Though, some players get insane fps drop-downs when close up to a model with transparent textures (I have that problem, drop from 100-90fps to 30fps, omg). Don't just overuse them though, heh.

classic example for me is on donner, that bis ass tree near allies 2nd, i get better fps looking down the middle than i do at that tree, seeing a drop from 100 to 60 is bad :E

the model can be scaled on the horizontal axis to make it longer without adding any extra polygons.

This is how I was able to make a large hedge-like model with only 52 polys.

Originally posted by Watchtower
the model can be scaled on the horizontal axis to make it longer without adding any extra polygons.

This is how I was able to make a large hedge-like model with only 52 polys.

so I can change my 30 or so models into one big one? cool, how do I do that :D