Tutorial Home / Plan / Establish Target Platform

To establish your target computer platform you must ask yourself the following questions:

  1. Who will be using my Synthetic Environment?
    eg. who are your primary users or audience?
     
  2. What hardware and software are they likely to be using?
    eg. are your primary users new to computers and therefore likely to have basic systems or are they early adopters with the latest technology?
     
  3. How will my Synthetic Environment be delivered to them?
    eg. CD-ROM, floppy disk, Internet. This will largely dictate what total filesize you will be limited to. An audience of dial-up modem users isn't going to wait for 20 minutes while your world downloads!
     
  4. When will my Synthetic Environment be finished?
    eg. any project in development for over 6 months could be targeted towards a higher platform specification. Plan for the technology of tomorrow if necessary.

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You will always have restrictions, even if you're developing Synthetic Environments for a super computer! Use the guidelines below to get a general idea of what limitations you should be working within if you want to meet the needs of your target audience.

General Guidelines
(mid-2000)
Target
Platform
Synthetic Environment
CPU
(MHz)
RAM
(Mb)
Video
(Mb)
Comms
(kbps)
Polygons
 
Filesize
(Kb)
LOW
 Average home or business PC and all notebooks, with low-speed dial-up modem
<400
<64
<16
<28
< 4000
<150
MID
 Gaming machine or low-end graphics workstation with fast dial-up modem
400-800
64-128
16-32
28-56
<15000
<250
HIGH
 High-end gaming machine or graphics workstation or better with broadband Internet connection (T1, ISDN, cable, satellite, ADSL etc)
>800
>128
>32
>56
???
<5000

The number of polygons and total filesize are not the only factors affecting the performance and efficiency of your synthetic environments - they are simply the best overall indicators. Factors such as lighting, textures, animation and multimedia also have a significant impact so it's crucial that you continually test and optimise your worlds throughout the development process.

Remember also that Moore's Law describes the trend of computing power doubling every 18 months. So these mid-2000 guidelines need to be adjusted for future projects.

Video cards (also called graphics cards and 3D accelerators) are improving almost exponentially, to the point that high-end consumer gaming PCs are often faster than graphics workstations purchased less than 6 months ago for 2-4 times the price! Games are driving the development of real-time 3D hardware.

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