Oolite Bulletins

heikki III wrote:

Ahruman wrote:

heikki III wrote:

Would it be possible to add a feature to reduce the amount of displayable things to the bare minimum?

Yes, but it would be bad design and a bunch of extra work, with little gain. Adding extra options and tweak factors is a Bad Thing from a user experience point of view, and there’s just no way the game could be made to run fast with software rendering.

Of course, you are the guys actually developing this thing, so it is your call. But may I respectfully suggest that a game that fails to work is also a Bad Thing. If you really think you should require 3D acceleration, the Right Thing would surely to check for it in the beginning, and refuse to launch the program at all, if the requirements are not there. Starting the game with 3 fps and broken textures is not good.

Besides, there is already a tweak factor, "Reduced detail", which at the moment doesn't seem to make much of a difference. (and screen resolution, and even sound volume - those are tweaks many people expect from a game, and can handle)

Some tweak factors are unfortunately necessary. I’m going to have to add another for shaders. However, an “even lower detail” one would not only make configuration more complicated, it would fail to achieve much. At low detail, the game reduces the distance at which objects are drawn and the complexity of planets and the sky, but there are limits to how far you can go that way while still being able to play the game (you need to be able to see things). The models included with the game are very simple. But even if we completely stopped drawing anything except the black of space, software rendering would still not provide a playable frame rate.

Refusing to run would perhaps be an option, but a) OpenGL, by design, does not provide a general mechanism to detect whether it is using hardware acceleration, b) future highly parallel machines might obsolete the concept of specialized rendering hardware, and c) we don’t have an active Linux maintainer to make the change.

As for TGHC’s question… I’ve got a 233 MHz iMac G3 here. Last time I checked, Oolite worked fine on it (with software rendering), at about 0.5 FPS. That was a while ago, though.

My current 1.6 GHz iMac G5 is mostly capable of running Oolite well. :-) The GeForce 5200FX’s shader support is something of a joke, though.

Ahruman wrote:

Some tweak factors are unfortunately necessary. I'm going to have to add another for shaders. However, an "even lower detail" one would not only make configuration more complicated, it would fail to achieve much. At low detail, the game reduces the distance at which objects are drawn and the complexity of planets and the sky, but there are limits to how far you can go that way while still being able to play the game (you need to be able to see things). The models included with the game are very simple. But even if we completely stopped drawing anything except the black of space, software rendering would still not provide a playable frame rate.

Ok, ok. I have ordered myself a better graphics card. When it arrives, then I stop whining (about this, at least).

Ahruman wrote:

As for TGHC's question I've got a 233 MHz iMac G3 here. Last time I checked, Oolite worked fine on it (with software rendering), at about 0.5 FPS. That was a while ago, though.

I have a powerful machine (dual-core AMD-64 at 2GHz), but a simple built-in graphics card (Ati Radeon 200-something). In the lowest full-screen resolution I get something like 5-10 fps when docking. That is quite possible. before I tweaked my X settings, I got 1-3 fps, and had great respect to anyone who managed to dock at all...

- Heikki III

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In Murphy We Turst