I know this subject (are this too much triangles) is something that a lot of people ask because without the experience it is hard to know the correct values.
The game levels on my game are small but they look just like a landscape but at a smaller scale, with foliage and bumps in the terrain. I’m not using a landscape because I need it to be circular and it is so small (about 4000 units) that I decided to go with a static mesh.
Because I want to use texture blending (with the usual texture layers, like grass, rock, etc) and height maps I need it to have a bit of triangle density.
This map will be fully visible at all times with a small draw distance, so I think LOD does not apply here.
It will be too much if I use about 200k triangles only for this specific mesh? I don’t think it is, but I have to make sure before I proceed. I don’t want to waste time going in one direction only to change everything later.
In practice, a single mesh with 200,000 triangles may not work on all targets, especially not restricted targets like mobile and web.
You’ll probably want to chop it up in individual chunks of 40,000 triangles or so. This is not so much for culling reasons, but for technical compatibility reasons.
If your mesh has many materials on it, then each material counts as a “chopped chunk,” so you may already have the necessary bits separated – it’s impossible to tell from your description. The triangle limit (really, a “split vertex buffer limit”) would apply to each individual material.
Also, don’t forget to mark all of the static mesh/es as “static” in the editor. If you mark them “movable” they will be significantly heavier to render at runtime.
My game is a 3d platformer so it is not suited for mobile. There is little chance this game will ever be published, but if it would, it will be on PC and consoles.
I’m going to keep a single mesh and if I have the need to optimize I’ll look into break the mesh into smaller bits. I’ll try to keep it bellow 100k, maybe I’ll get enough density to work with.