Ziemanskye on 31/10/2009 at 12:40

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I think it'll take longer to load, and eat up more memory. And possibly need your vertexpools updated (so more graphics memory too).

However, by themselves I don't think either actually effect realtime performance as such: the shadows are expensive only when a shadow-casting light hits them, and similarly the physics shouldn't cost much except when things are bouncing off of them.

When these do happen (shadow-casting light hits shadow-casting object, or physics object hits physics hull), then the effect on performance is mostly a matter of how much "brute strength" the system playing the level has. I can't give you any kind of numbers or rules, or even useful "I've tried this and found that...." tips, but the high-level general advise is always that shadows and lights are expensive in this engine so you should be careful when and how you use them.

Erm...

Perhaps look at it from the other end? You can have exact collisions and shadows on everything if you want to - but the trade off if you want to have "decent performance" (and have other people able to play your level) is that you need to keep the level of detailling and the number of objects down. The level's I've made wouldn't survive that, because I put a lot of objects into my levels, and I tend to make them quite brightly lit, and since the shadows can be so harsh it can also look a bit strange. For a level of detail akin to the OMs, you'd need to beat the recommended machine specs on the back of the box, at least probably with a bigger graphics card, but otherwise as long as you keep things appropriately portalled and optimised, you can get away with it.

For a lower (and some might say more "classic thief" or "historically accurate") level of detail it probably wouldn't hurt that much.