seeking guidance: object counts etc..

hi all.

been toying with construct classic for a year now. made a few small simple games and decided to try something more ambitious.

im toying with the idea of making a top down shooter/adventure with somewhat large open levels. im going to use pretty low res pixel art, so to start, i think i havent much worry with the vram, but one thing thats worrying me though, is the object count on any level im going to make. with all the environment art, trees, river, enemies roaming around, structures, vehicles, im pretty scared that im going to end up with a bloated levels and performance issues.

simple question is:

how many objects is too much, basically?

just trying to get some perspective here, since i have a pretty powerful desktop pc, so its hard to tell if im going to make the game too demanding.

for example, is 3000 objects(not all unique) on a layout too ambitious?

or is that just pretty much normal figure for a level of any kind?

(i really dont know since all my games have been really simple with mostly levels being one screen in size)

ive done some tests with just spraying layout full of instances of a sprite, but its kinda hard to tell, since the editor itself starts to slow down, especially when you select a crapload of instances at once.ive had crashes before when doing that. im probably going to use as much of tiled backgrounds as i can, but still, could i get some advices about how to start making bigger maps? just some kind of numbers would serve as precious guidelines to start compiling the levels.

anyway, sorry if im not being too specific with this. its just that im on the verge of starting something rather time consuming, and unsure if im going to end up in a dead end with this,so i need to plan carefully with the performance in mind.

also to note, im not exactly aiming to make it for the low end laptops or pcs, but still, i dont want it to be resource hog like crysis either <img src="smileys/smiley36.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

There are no numbers to tell you, but a few facts:

1) The total number of objects on a layout isn't important. The total number of objects on screen is. So, if most of the objects gather around one spot on the layout you will reach a limit much quicker than if they are spreaded around the layout.

2) The window size counts. Imagine Full HD against VGA. Not only does the graphic card have to render 6.75x the pixel count of VGA, the viewable area is also larger and therefore more objects are visible at once (see point 1)

3) The editor has a hard time handling the selection of many objects/instances. Avoid it as much as possible.

4) The editor will have a hard time handling a huge project. This is why it may be better to use C2 instead. However, the runtime is rock solid, so if you can manage to work with a sensible editor that leaves you waiting 30 minutes when opening a huge project, crashes a lot and has its hiccups, then you get a stable and fast game when compiled (better: if compiled <img src="smileys/smiley2.gif" border="0" align="middle" /> )

you just told me everything i wanted/needed to hear, so thanks much!

now i can rest easy and continue. aint too afraid about the unstable editor. game is still going to be rather "small" even if its gonna have somewhat large levels.

i was also thinking about making randomized levels to avoid bloating the editor, but that kind of defeats the purpose of this game in question. we'll see...

now im off to construct, thanks!