To old GL or not to old GL

[cwstjdenobs]

Still working on the space trading sim and have finally got around to writing the basics of the 3D graphics engine. But there's one thing I can't decide on. Whether I should support legacy GL for older GPU's? Now apart from the extra work it really has only 1 downside, it will look really shitty compared to the Gl 3.3+ version. I also don't know if people would want the option. But if people would it would be easier to start adding it in now than later.

 

[Rydian]

Depends on your target user base. Many people I've seen playing those games are older (like 30-40) and while a few are hardware nuts and run 4 video cards, some run on older hardware.

 

[cwstjdenobs]

Ah right yes, I've just done a search on this and I'd pretty much be ruling out anything with onboard graphics. I'm actually surprised by that.

The age range thing is a problem that's being worrying me a bit. I don't want to push the older crowd out but some mechanism that allows play to be more immediate than most of these things is a definite must. I'm really thinking that can be sorted by the right choice of FTL though TBH. Things like time compression are a definite no no.

 

[Rydian]

Totally forgot this with my last post.

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

 

[cwstjdenobs]

Wow thanks for that link. Totally bookmarked and it's actually put my mind at rest a bit. It looks like 70% of people who play games on the PC (I'm making the presumption that Steam users are a very representative sample) have something of about the GeForce 8 series quality or better. But that still means there's 30% who need a fixed pipeline implementation.

I've also being told by quite a few people that some ATIs cards still have very crappy or no OGL support at all so a DX option will probably be needed at some point.

 

[Rydian]

Steam is a good representation, considering they also deal with 2D games like Terraria and all that jazz, so yeah everybody loves their hardware surveys.

ATI/AMD cards are what's used on macbook pros (at least not and a few times in the past), and considering that WoW runs with a GL renderer on OSX I'm not so sure on that rumor.