Low quality graphic output layer for old PCs

[albert]

Hello again,

It is possible to develop a low quality graphic layer, that means a special mode where I have very limited graphics (perhaps not only limited but a completly different, very simple 2D graphics engine)? Is your current engine extendable enough for this?

Because it would be very nice to play this game also on very limited, very old PCs, so that players on these old PCs use this fallback-simple-2D-engine and the other players use the realy nice 3D graphic.

If this is possible in principle, I am thinking of helping you on this topic.

Greetings,

Albert

[DeadHead]

It would require making the engine support the 2d graphics which would be quite a bit of work. Also, new graphics would have to be made for every single unit because 3d models could not be used if you wanted a 2d game engine, and that would require more work, plus, it would greatly increase the size of the game (hard disk space) as the animations for each unit take up space.

It is possible, though, to include lower polygon models that require not as much in a computer, and I believe that they are making lower polygon models as well. this way, the computer would not have to render as much at a time.

Edited March 5, 2007 by DeadHead

[albert]

Yould could create a converter, which simply converts all the 3D models to 2D pictures. If it works good (and it should be possible), it's not that much work. The simple 2D engine and the needed abstractation in the game to make it possible to select different graphic engines will require more work (but if it's designed well till now, also not that much).

But you are right, it will require more disc space. But I think it should be easily possible to select it as an option in the installation progress (and you will perhaps disable all the 3D stuff on an old PC).

[Ykkrosh]

It's an interesting idea, though I'm unsure how feasible it would be. At the moment, graphics isn't the only important performance issue - CPU speed is relevant for running all the simulation (largely since the flexibility of scripting and data-drivenness has a necessary cost). So the game won't work well on really old computers, and if you have a fast enough CPU then you'd probably have the hardware to do at least some form of 3d graphics acceleration. In that case, it's probably much easier to just disable some features in the game's normal 3d renderer - we don't have low-poly versions of the models (and I believe they would need too much effort for too little benefit), but it's easy to do low-resolution textures and disable shadows (and if you want to be really extreme, disable lighting and animations and terrain blending and transparency, though then it'd be much worse looking than the original Age of Empires.)

The engine isn't really designed to support multiple different graphics systems (which is more than just the renderer, though it's not designed to support multiple renderers either). It's roughly modular, but there are quite a few components that care about graphics - GUI, minimap, console, profiler, etc - and they would all have to be changed to support a new system. I'm not sure at the moment whether it's something we'd want to do or not...