Spring + decoupled renderer

[imbaczek]

well that's bad and sad.

[lurker]

Still, GF6 or 9500+ isn't too harsh of a requirement.

[NOiZE]

Still, GF6 or 9500+ isn't too harsh of a requirement.

Exactly! And think of the Future!!

[SwiftSpear]

Still, GF6 or 9500+ isn't too harsh of a requirement.

It's pretty harsh...

That being said... I wouldn't be surprised for a commercial game to exceed those requirements. Worst case scenario we fork and run two versions both playing simultaneously through the spring lobby server. Hopefully though, we can keep it all in one version and enough of the old graphics system would be intact that you could just choose weather to use the new renderer or the old one as an option (although, mods then might need the ability to override this for their own art generation purposes if generating compatible old/new art proves to be too much work)

[Stealth870]

How can you even play Spring on an integrated chip??

[imbaczek]

I can, thankyouverymuch. Works fine for 1v1s and 2v2s, which is all I play.

[Archangel of Death]

How can you even play Spring on an integrated chip??

Easy: Install. Double-click icon.
My Radeon Xpress200 chipset did a fair job at it, and this Laptop's intel 965 doesn't perform much worse than my desktops current 7600GT, until it crashes...

[lurker]

I'm on intel integrated graphics. I usually get 15-20 fps at mid-late game, and that in large team games. But if I had to get a cheap Geforce, I wouldn't care. My laptop gets okay fps on it's 200 xpress, but the cpu fails.

[smoth]

does this break any of the lua/luaui work that utilizes opengl? Does it work with all content?

IK is all fine and good in those games as they use maybe 50-250 units spring has >500 units per player.

[lurker]

It looks like it will completely break the former, but hopefully all the latter will work fine with proper conversion.

[child]

I wasn't aware springmark collects information about the gfxcard, too!

After a close look I see a majority of ogl 2.0 cards. Still there are a lot of non-ogl2.0 cards. Mostly laptops and some Geforce FX's and a single Geforce4 MX(They just wont die!!! ). I still don't like that it's only a partial cross-section of data. Springmark used to be a check to make sure no weak setups would ruin a big & potentially intense game. Is that still the case? If so, then those springmark numbers are kinda biased towards the higher hardware-limit since users with weaker machines dont need to bother with Springmark. What do you think?

I feel that Ogre3d might be the better renderer of choice. Sadly it's not as slim and as elegant as Horde3d.

[KDR_11k]

Careful, people with low specs might have avoided springmark because the only purpose of that service was to prove to JJ that your comp is good, if you have low specs anyway there's no reason for you to run it.

[imbaczek]

I second Ogre3d. It's fat and bloated, but works fine (commercial projects used it), and is out of beta for a long time. Also, the huge community is nothing to scoff at.

[child]

That's what I thought.

That's why I'm currently thinking about Ogre. It fully supports Opengl and Directx. For very old cards there is even the complete fixed function pipeline. But this comes at the prize of a more complex render-pipeline and materials(lots of different files). In other goods news there was just an alpha-release of OgreCollada, a utility for porting collada files into Ogre and there are a couple of terrain-scenemanagers we can choose from.

I'm using Ogre for years now in my own game-engine, so setting it up for Spring should be a no-brainer. I'm looking into the details.

I'm eager to hear your thoughts.

[NOiZE]

Springmark isn't really a good measure, a lot of ppl boycoted it, just out of principle.

[tombom]

Still, GF6 or 9500+ isn't too harsh of a requirement.

That's a pretty big deal for a lot of people. Although it's not too harsh for commercial games, for free games you need all the players you can get and cutting out half the playerbase for what, to them, seems like little benefit is a pretty huge minus.

(I have a Radeon 9200)

[Zenka]

I don't get it. how can people suggest that commercial games may have a GF6 requirement and non-commercial games MUST be lower.

If lack of opengl 2.0 support is the problem. you can get an opengl 2.0 supporting card for 40$.
The latest version of spring is released this year. Name one game released this year that uses 500+ units, with a fully 3d rendering engine, and runs on your GPU from 2002. (take in account your CPU and memory also come from that age).

Why must the engine go forward if the hardware that runs it must remain the same?

[smoth]

OGRE is NOT a good engine.

I have used it and the now dead OSRTS project rejected it.

[child]

OGRE is NOT a good engine.

I have used it and the now dead OSRTS project rejected it.

Ogre does its job pretty well. I'm sorry, the statement "not a good engine" is a bit too subjective for me. It really depends on the requirements of a project. In the end some things serve the purpose well and others not.

Instead of leaving a 2 sentence reply, why dont you elaborate why you think it's not a good engine and how have you used the engine?

[imbaczek]

If lack of opengl 2.0 support is the problem. you can get an opengl 2.0 supporting card for 40$.

I'd gladly do that if you know a way to put in my Intel 945-based laptop.