[Dragon]

Yeah, BP didn't really branch out, but did include builds with cutting-edge features it needed, but that were not even stable enough for nightlies (at least in theory. I was using BP builds all the time, they were rather reliable). In fact, they were no different from test builds posed on this board, except for the more prompt update schedule and the fact they sometimes contained multiple unstable features at a time. It was something like Antipodes on steroids.
I think that here, branching is a bad idea. It adds a lot of overhead to manage yet another code branch, especially one that is not planned to be merged in at any point. Inferno was rather unproblematic, because the difference wasn't too drastic, and didn't affect key areas of the game like this one would.

[General Battuta]

We didn't need deferred lighting, we just wanted to give it a broad-base test so the SCP could get information on how it would affect end users.

[Dragon]

In that case, yeah (perhaps I should have said "wanted" instead of "needed" ), though remember that this feature also did affect the development. Without it running on a BP build, we wouldn't be able to add glowpoint lighting as fast as we did. So in a way, it was needed, because we wanted lighting for glowpoints. Hardly anything that would hold up the release, but hey, BP1 was originally written on 3.6.9, IIRC. Shadows would probably be a better example, since they didn't involve any table changes (though TBH, once shadows were implemented, they were kind of needed for everything, because they are just that awesome).

[General Battuta]

Unfortunately the implementation isn't really ready for prime time. Glowpoint lighting and shadows are being stripped out for the next release and moved to an optional package because they caused so many performance problems.

[Swifty]

Hopefully I'll do my best to optimize it. The current deferred lighting and soft shadows build already has some optimizations for deferred lighting but the soft shadows kind of eliminates that performance boost. The next test build for deferred lighting and soft shadows will definitely be faster.

[jr2]

So I have one of those dual laptop integrated with real card as well, and FSO (and some other games) refuse to see the second bin integrated card. I have to use noglsl (which is why I stopped trying to play, among other reasons). 

[Dragon]

Hopefully I'll do my best to optimize it. The current deferred lighting and soft shadows build already has some optimizations for deferred lighting but the soft shadows kind of eliminates that performance boost. The next test build for deferred lighting and soft shadows will definitely be faster.

Looking forward to it. Performance improvements are always welcome. I can hardly play without shadows now.

[pecenipicek]

So I have one of those dual laptop integrated with real card as well, and FSO (and some other games) refuse to see the second bin integrated card. I have to use noglsl (which is why I stopped trying to play, among other reasons). 

if its an optimus laptop, go to nvidia control panel, manage 3d settings, program settings, add the fso executable of the day and set it to run on that card...

[jr2]

I did. No dice. Something (FSO?) is ignoring that setting, which works for 99 % of all the other programs I run.

[niffiwan]

Sorry if this is "duh obvious", but you've got the fso release & debug .exes selected in the control panel, not the launcher?

[jr2]

 

[niffiwan]

Yeah, that's a weird one then since as far as I know FSO doesn't know anything about selecting video cards, is just uses what it's given by the OS.

[m!m]

Could you try an antipodes build? The OpenGL context is created by SDL which might be different from what FSO currently does.

[jr2]

This gives me a reason to fix my laptop (hard disk dying, dog knocked it down while runnin).

I'll work on it.