Whats a good amount for a biped that'll run smoothly for most pcs? I still want to some stuff straps for the leg, walkie talkie on the back. Criticism appreciated.

You can have large numbers (up to about 5000 from what I hear) when it comes to poly counts with such things as bipeds, vehicles, scenery, etc. Just make sure you create good LODs.

You'll be fine :)
The chief is like 2,016 polies, and the xbox had to keep up with 16 of him, and a bunch of multiplayer vehicles too. The PC could do more i'm sure.

Okay thanks for the replies guys. The images will only be up for a month, then the links will be recycled.

16 of him only a few which were at full count at one time. Same with the vehicles.
Try importing the chief's LODs and you will see how they work and observe the model file to see how the LOD cutoffs work.
Also, creating LODs and exporting them is very easy. If you need assistance when you are done, I could probably help out a bit, but I believe there is a very easy tutorial for halo LODs out there from which I learned. Try googling that, because I learned to make LODs from that tutorial in literally a matter of minutes.

wait a second im pretty sure the original chief had about like 200 polys i remember opening him once in 3ds max, the other chiefs your thinking about are prolly custom chiefs

Not possible to have only 200 polies. It's around 2k

It's still not going to put a stress-test on !blam. sheesh

...yeeeeeah if it was 200 polies the legs and arms and EVERYTHING would be so insanely low poly. yeah it's about 2k polies. Import the one in the "characters" folder and you will see the true model.

i think i got the reference model somewhere online its rigged and everything, but you guys play around in halo more than i do so ill take your word for it. hopefully i can get a little under 2k polies and my mod can run with no problems for most computers. do you guys have any techniques for best performance mods?
textures, scripting, lighting, enemy encounters, etc...

"Supposedly Halo 2 used less polygons for Masterchief than Halo 1, and I’ve heard that Call of Duty 4 used less polygons for the character models that CoD2 did – I suspect this will due to relying more heavily on normal mapping to create the details.......Halo, Xbox, 2001
Masterchief – 2,000 polygons"
http://www.stonetrip.com/developer/472-how-many-polygons

for highly detailed dont go above 8000 because then no gfx pcs cant see them causing it to tear