I know there are some modelers here. What are the requirements to make a clean mesh for import into a game? I know video games use tris. But I've seen people model in quads. You can have the program convert to tris when you're done. At the moment I'm mixing tris and quads. Is this ok? Are there rules for how many edges are allowed to radiate from a single vertex? etc... Haven't even begun to look into the process for UV mapping. Sigh. Daunting.
Well, the most basic things you have to look out for are polygons with more than 4 edges. Everything is always in tris, even the model you have there, but the modeling software is displaying it in quads and so forth. Since you're using 3dsmax, you can set it to show the tris in the model.
For your model, there's that one polygon with a gazillion edeges, so that's going to get messed up for sure, so you better cut it to quads. Then there's things like polystrips, fans and such that make processing of the model/texture faster, but you probably don't need to think about those atm.
You should check that most quads are almost planar to make sure there wont be any shading errors in the engine due to weird normals. Another thing to be aware of is very long quads, cause they're going to be cut in half to make two tris which can cause weird shading in places.