I think the sweet spot is really somewhere in between. Some smoothing groups in the model with some non-smoothed angles. But until then, I'll add a poll for the two choices we currently have.

To add to that, large flat polys that are not in a smoothing group tend to look not as good with the lighting in the game as large polys in smoothing groups, because of the way gouroud lighting can be used with them. Small groups of angular polys that are not in smoothing groups can also look very good, though obviously will look faceted.

I would say for the Rhino, keep the smoothing groups around the main hull and the back parts, but separate out the top part that's raised up a bit so that it is not smoothed and that little ridge can catch the light really well.

I'd prefer if the Rhino was less, for lack of a better term... Thin/flatter. The sloping sides to me look weird compared to the top which is level. So it was more hexagonal. :3

I'm working on a rebuild of the current rhino model, there are a lot of mesh issues. Should cut the poly count down quite a bit as well.

Don't worry too much about the Poly count. I always used to say around a 2000 poly limit for the bigger ships, but apparently we're totally CPU bound still and the GPU for most people is just sitting around waiting for the CPU. So an extra thousand poly's really wouldn't make any difference at this point, even to people on low graphics setting.

That's great, can add a lot of extra detail then without worrying about resources too much. Good to know :p

The main thing to worry about optimizing is the texture sizes. That's what causes the game to take a while when you load it up. I've been getting some of the glow maps that I've made down to just a few K =)

Any chance the glowmaps could be sharpened, jeff? At the moment they're so blurry they hardly add anything to the game.

I noticed the texture issue and made a post about it here:
viewtopic.php?f=97&t=48491