Counting Polygons

Is there anyway in blitz to count the number of polygons in a loaded 3ds file?

Just iterate through all the surfaces in the mesh and use CountTriangles() on them.

you could hide all other meshes, do a renderworld and then check TrisRendered()

ALternatively you could also use a second camera that is way off the scene, clone the mesh, position it in front of that far-away camera and do the same as I said before.

The most complicaed method may be to parse all surfaces and count the triangles. Well, maybe it even isn't that complicated.

Pretty simple.

Function CountMeshTriangles(Mesh)
  Local Tris = 0
  For i = 1 To CountSurfaces(Mesh)
    Tris = Tris + CountTriangles(GetSurface(Mesh, i))
  Next
  Return Tris
End Function

(Untested)

If it's loaded with LoadMesh then ok. But if it's loaded with LoadAnimMesh then you need to parse the children recursively.

Example 3 does it here:
http://www.blitzbasic.com/codearcs/codearcs.php?code=796