Spring RTS Engine

I have an old PC that has a i815 chipset inside. It doesn't seems to support "GL_ARB_texture_env_combine". But would it be possible to deactivate the usage of it ?

I don't really care about eye candy, since i think that the main interest in Spring is the gameplay.

I would be nice to lower the entry barrier to Spring, even if it's not so good looking any more.

If all you care about is the gameplay, play OTA!

(... sorry, couldn't help myself...)

Warlord, Spring has better gameplay than OTA, (apart from a few bugs )
And I imagine the multiplayer for Spring will only grow in popularity as more features/bugfixes are added, whereas OTA multiplayer is nigh on dead (I assume - I've never gotten it to work myself, so I could be wrong).

Well, thats all very true, but if you start _that_ race to the botton, next comes the guy with a p300 who want to run it in software mode.
Spring is a 3D RTS, and should at least be able to ultilize a 3d card (the i815 isnt a 3dcard, its a disease) and a less thhen 5 year old cpu (2Ghz+).

Dont reduce the enjoyment of everybody only to let some cheapscates with antique machines be able to run it.

Doomweaver wrote:Warlord, Spring has better gameplay than OTA, (apart from a few bugs )
And I imagine the multiplayer for Spring will only grow in popularity as more features/bugfixes are added, whereas OTA multiplayer is nigh on dead (I assume - I've never gotten it to work myself, so I could be wrong).

Better gameplay? Someday maybe, but not yet, and definetly not with XTA.

At the moment Spring is simply trying to emulate. It has a number of innovations (area loading, drag building, etc), but these are all minor helpful additions to TA's gameplay; Spring has not done all that much to add new gameplay (although it has done things, such as the terrain slowing). Therefore, while I expect Spring gameplay to outstrip TA gameplay at somepoint in the (likely near) future, at this point in time, TA's gameplay is probably more reliable.

IMSabbel wrote:Well, thats all very true, but if you start _that_ race to the botton, next comes the guy with a p300 who want to run it in software mode.
Spring is a 3D RTS, and should at least be able to ultilize a 3d card (the i815 isnt a 3dcard, its a disease) and a less thhen 5 year old cpu (2Ghz+).

Dont reduce the enjoyment of everybody only to let some cheapscates with antique machines be able to run it.

The problem is everybody has the opinion that suits them best. I bought a new machine last year which clocks under 2GHz. Most of the laptops you can buy right now are sub 2GHz.

In my experience the unavoidable limiting factor is the RAM usage. The engine has a lot of plates to keep spinning at once, you just can't get round that. I don't know how well it works with 256MB of RAM, but I think that it would be good to support processors in line with the maximum RAM the motherboard is likely to have.

However, maybe these are issues to address when we get to the end of beta testing.

Just my tuppence.

Munch

Well, my computer has a good processor but 256 MBs of RAM, and I can run spring just fine with slightly below average quality settings.

IMSabbel wrote:Well, thats all very true, but if you start _that_ race to the botton, next comes the guy with a p300 who want to run it in software mode.
Spring is a 3D RTS, and should at least be able to ultilize a 3d card (the i815 isnt a 3dcard, its a disease) and a less thhen 5 year old cpu (2Ghz+).

Dont reduce the enjoyment of everybody only to let some cheapscates with antique machines be able to run it.

I like to run it on the Nokia 770.

IMSabbel wrote:next comes the guy with a p300 who want to run it in software mode.

IMSabbel wrote:Dont reduce the enjoyment of everybody only to let some cheapscates with antique machines be able to run it.

I certainly don't want to cut the "enjoyment of everybody" [ Hey ! i'm also in everybody ], but why wouldn't be possible to deactivate extensions ? ( Yeah ! Flat shaded units without texture ). This way happy gamers with a GeForce 36,000,000 can have a nice looking screen and people with a lower specs card can even play the game :)

The thing is that GL_ARB_texture_env_combine is really REALLY basic extension. I checked it and it was already added to the standard OpenGL library at version 1.3, which is from 2001.

If a gfx chipset doesn't support this extension it is probably caused by an incomplete driver and not the card itself. Anyway, I think even the absolute cheapest graphics card you can buy in the stores now supports it, so I don't think it's too much to ask if you require this extension.

So if the extension is not required, you still need 1 GHz cpu to play a decent game...

How low is low spec?

I've had spring running on an Athlon 700 with GF3, Dual P4 1.8GHz with ATI 7200, XP2000 with ATI 9800Pro.

That i815 is going to limit all your future game choices drastically, but it will still run OTA. But you can by a much better GFX card than yours for less than the price of a new game. Since Spring is free and you should already own OTA then how hard can it be?

Weaver wrote:How low is low spec?

I really like to run it on the Nokia 770.

Arbitraryness is fun.

Lets say target the game at a $300 US system... which, without XP, monitor etc...(you have that already) and with on-board everything(sound/nic/3dvideo) would be at about 2.4Ghz 512 RAM... fine for TA...and honestly if you have a computer with stats lower then that you havn't upgraded properly for like 5 years anyways... I mean, you'll have trouble running XP and playing flash games with stats less then that...

I think a lot of people have go a processor under 2ghz...
Think about laptop user..
I agree that support integrated crappy video card is not needed.

For the ram, it's not difficult to add 256 mb..so 512 is ok.

Yeah, my laptop is 5 years old and has 700Mhz... 256 RAM... the cheapest laptops still costs twice as much as the cheapest desktops and have half the power... so aim for a $1200 laptop, which would then have the equivalent specs of a $300 desktop... I was trying to express that a TA capable PC would cost less then $300... I wasn't saying "anyone who has a computer that can't play spring hasn't upgraded in 5 years"... that was hyperbole...

$300? for £200 I can get the components to start off a decent 64bit system with ram cpu case psu, and most people already have hardrive and cd drive, just a graphics card which varies in price...

200 pounds is about 400 us dollars right now... so that's about right...

EDIT: or did you mean I'm setting the bar too high, video card, 100 buck, processor ram and mobo 200... I thought that was pretty reasonable...

nmmm I thought 200 pounds sterlign was equivalent to somewhere around 300 US dollar give or take $15 eitherway.

Nah... the US$ is doing pretty bad right now... XE.xom says
200.00 GBP = 361.984 USD