Hi folks! Excited for the jam to begin!

While waiting for the jam to begin, I'm thinking that I want to make something 3D, and I want to make sure I keep my models and textures in the range of something you would actually find in a PS1 game.

Excuse my ignorance,  but does anyone know what resolution of textures and what kind of polygon/tri counts would be realistic for the era? And would multiple light sources be realistic? How about normal maps?

 I came across this discussion which looks like a great starting point: https://forum.unity.com/threads/where-to-start-if-i-want-create-ps1-style-game-a...

First of all, looks like lights are out all together.  Instead, I'll need to use unlit shaders instead. The discussion above also links to 2 shaders which help with the PS1 look.

For textures, I found one source that said they used 128x128 textures for the vehicles in Twisted Metal, so something around that range is likely good.

For the polycount, the people in the discussion mentioned keeping the the polycount on screen below 3000.

Please leave a message if this is helpful for you, or if you have any other suggestions.

max texture resolution on the ps1 was 256x256, most textures were about 128x128. Lighting was possible on the ps1 in the form of vertex lighting / gouraud shading. character polycount depends on type of game. Metal Gear Solid had Snake at around 600 tris, I'm personally aiming for around 350-400 for mine.

And the number of textures that could be on the screen at once depended on the resolution (and possibly also the colour depth) of those textures. The PS1 had a megabyte of "VRAM" that the textures would normally have to fit into. If each pixel took up 15 bits (1.875 bytes), you could still have about 550 thousand pixels in the textures. So if each texture has 128x128 pixels, you could have about 30 textures. If you use fewer bits per pixel, you can fit more pixels in the RAM, but then you have fewer colours to work with.

The Saturn had 1.5 megabytes of VRAM, and theN64 had 32KB (which you could change multiple times during a frame to put in different textures but that would be somewhat slow, so that's why N64 games used fewer and smaller textures.

For now, I haven't had to use textures, although I guess I might have to at some point. The amount of triangles you can draw also depends on how you draw them, so if you go without textures or vertex colours and just give each triangle one colour you can get 360000 triangles on screen at once, texturing or lighting halves it, and using both texturing and lighting halves it twice.