If you subdivide using a meshsmooth or turbosmooth modifier you leave it at the top of the stack to create high resolution models for rendering. You can of course collapse the stack and have all those extra polygons but you wouldnt normally want to do that for a game model.
usually for game models you create low res meshes without subdivision and use the properties of the engine's shaders to give the illusion of smoothness. smoothing groups in max shade groups of polygons so they appear to run into each other instead of being faceted.
The other major thing to utilise is normal mapping where you create a high res mesh and a low res mesh and create maps that contain the depth information based on the higher resolution model. then lights and shaders in the game engine will make the low res models look very similar to the high res model it was based on.

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Nicely said Tyson!

With the mesh or turbosmooth ontop of a mesh, and with the edit poly or edit mesh selected click the 'test tube' icon (or toggle show end result button), that will show you the smoothed version whilst working on the lowres version.

There is no 'true' subdiv modeling in max (to my knowledge), other than using the Orionflame plugin. That allows you to simply hit the + button to smooth the mesh, but you carry on modeling on the lowres base mesh, without having mesh or turbosmooths ontop. Hitting the - button takes you down a subdiv level.

~C

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Wow! Thanks so much for the information! That makes more sense.

I'll try out those modifiers and the shortcuts with the + and - buttons

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don't tell tyson I said this but he used to teach this stuff.... pick his brains... seriously haha.

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The + and - thing won't work unless you have the specific plugin that byder mentioned.

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