Here are some tips for the modelers. These tips should give some useful information on how to design the models so that they work best in Boson.
The models should be quite low-poly. In general, try to keep number of faces as low as possible. Exact number of polys to use depends on the model, for models which will be used a lot in a map (e.g. trees) use less polys, and for models which will likely be used just once on a map (e.g. command center) you can use more polys. Here are some (very) general guidelines for different models:
Tree - 50-100 faces
Player's tank - around 500 faces
Player's facility - 500-1000 faces
Complex map-specific model - up to 3000 faces This is for complex models which are used only once or few times at most on a map. Such models might e.g. include big and complex factory.
Use low number of meshes. Again, the lower the number of meshes is, the better. Best (although sometimes not possible) would be to use a single mesh per model. Certainly try to use no more than 5 meshes per model. Also note that Boson's model converter will automatically merge meshes with same materials and textures.
Try to use single texture per model. This is not that important (as it requires a lot of additional time and effort), but it's good if you do it, because then the texture doesn't have to be changed when rendering different meshes and thus the performance will be better.
Put small details which aren't that important for the model into separate meshes. In the future, small meshes may be removed for higher LOD (level of detail) levels. This is not used ATM and isn't very important.
ATM the wheels do not rotate.. In the future we might either have a list of wheel meshes in unit config files (e.g. "Wheels=wheel1,wheel2,mybigwheel") or we might just consider all meshes that have "wheel" in their names to be wheels.
Or maybe using hotspots where attach a wheel mesh (that is, another object in the game, which can be used also for particles like when a car explode)
