Graphics hardware compatibility

[janwas]

I like the sound of that. Of the 2% lacking fragment_program, some are also way below the min spec we established years ago (Rage 128? LOL)

So: good to have the data; it looks like this decision now rests upon a wide enough survey.

[asmartgoat]

Can i just make a point, i tried to run the game on a system incompatible with GLSL, i got a nice message and the game looked like someone stretched the textures in every direction.

If anyone can confirm this behaviour, you can and should remove support for non-glsl compatible systems.

Just my 2 cents.

[Ykkrosh]

GLSL isn't required, and the game works without it - you probably had some other problem (e.g. no OpenGL acceleration at all), but it's hard to tell without more detail (e.g. what the error message said).

I started playing with some GL_ARB_fragment_program stuff, and it seems to work cleanly enough. Currently it renders all the non-transparent models, with lighting and shadows (and a similar-looking fallback behaviour when GL_ARB_fragment_program_shadow isn't supported) and player colour and smooth fading into the FoW/SoD, with a single ~40-line fragment program and ~30-line vertex program, with hotloading and a preprocessor (copied from Ogre) and flexible name-based binding of textures and uniform parameters. Interestingly it makes the 'sun overbrightness' control in Atlas much more useful, because the intermediate calculations don't all get clamped to [0, 1] so it can result in strongly over-saturated colours that make everything look much brighter. Also started writing about the target requirements.