[Taristin]

Just how old a video card do you need to have anyway to not support HTL? My old comp with a Geforce 3 works just fine with HTL, so it would have to be older than that. Honestly, I can't see people with that old a system being able to properly run FSO anyway, so why bother? No matter what you do, there's always going to be retail to fall back upon for people with truely ancient systems.

Not ancient... cheap. This gorramn intel chipset on my laptop isn't HTL compliant. And it sucks.

[Shade]

Ick, ok, I admit I failed to consider on-board graphics. Never did trust those to do a proper job. Can fix that for less than the price of your average game these days though, quick check tells me a GF MX 4000 can be had for less than 40$ Well, for desktops anyway, obviously laptops are a different story.

I guess the conclusion of the day is that Intel = Suck. At least for graphics.

[CP5670]

[q]Just how old a video card do you need to have anyway to not support HTL? My old comp with a Geforce 3 works just fine with HTL, so it would have to be older than that. Honestly, I can't see people with that old a system being able to properly run FSO anyway, so why bother? No matter what you do, there's always going to be retail to fall back upon for people with truely ancient systems.[/q]

Something older than a GF256 I guess, since that's where it was first introduced. I have some old cards that probably won't support it, although they're either collecting dust or are in my retro game system that I only use for Glide and DOS stuff.

Retail doesn't have all the extra sexps and gameplay related features, so any missions using those will only work with FSO.

[Fineus]

I'm beginning to wonder which is better: Keeping on the few who still run something older than a GF256, or gaining a lot more by having the most up to date and advanced features possible.

I have a funny feeling that by keeping things limited to allow the FSO to be played on an original spec machine, one is sacrificing a much larger audience with more advanced PCs.

I know there are some sweeping generalisations there, but something tells me I'm right.

[Turnsky]

i'd be happy with just openGL only, i mean, since a couple of the nicer looking games that have recently come out have used it (doom 3, quake 4, etc) means it's still quite the api to use for some time to come.

just... be careful with the spec mapping lest it look like plastic

[Cobra]

same here. OpenGL apparently uses a hell of a lot less memory than D3D since it doesn't have all the  memory leaks.

[Goober5000]

I have a funny feeling that by keeping things limited to allow the FSO to be played on an original spec machine, one is sacrificing a much larger audience with more advanced PCs.

Well taylor and I have both thought about investigating some sort of "dual-boot" thing where the game could use either the up-to-date engine or the original DX5 engine.  That's one of those "maybe one day I'll get around to it" sort of things, though.  You never know, it could happen - just like multiple docking.

[Nix]

So I'm correct in assuming that there's still no hope for ATI users to get Shinemaps working at all.  Also, am I correct in assuming that Environement Mapping is the same thing as Shinemaps, just that Shinemaps work in D3D and Env Mapping works in OGL?  If Env. Mapping worked, would that yield the nicer lighting ingame?

[StratComm]

So I'm correct in assuming that there's still no hope for ATI users to get Shinemaps working at all.  Also, am I correct in assuming that Environement Mapping is the same thing as Shinemaps, just that Shinemaps work in D3D and Env Mapping works in OGL?  If Env. Mapping worked, would that yield the nicer lighting ingame?

Unfortunately that's pretty much all wrong.  Shinemaps work for ATI cards - in OGL mode.  Shinemaps and environment mapping are quite different things (shinemapping gives specular effects, so some surfaces reflect more light than others, environment mapping gives you reflections of the background but doesn't treat light sources specially).  Ordinarily they would be complementary, if they worked together.

[Nix]

hehe.. I stand so corrected.  Thanks. 

The reason why I asked was I've seen screenshots taken with people using nvidia cards, and they have these eerie-looking blue-ish reflections on the ships and such, but for me, it's looked just like retail.  Certain effects DO work in OGL for me, but I'm not clear on what produces those nice shadows and reflections.  I recall that if I did downgrade to 4.3, I WOULD get the nice reflections, but anything above and it looks like retail.

[StratComm]

With spec and glow mapping enabled it doesn't look anything like retail IMHO, but what you're describing is environment mapping.  It still works in D3D, or it would if it weren't currently broken.

[Wanderer]

-ambient_factor 75.. put that to the command line (custom flags line in the launcher).. with default ambient_factor it looks pretty close to retail even with glow sand spec enabled..

[CP5670]

-ambient_factor 75.. put that to the command line (custom flags line in the launcher).. with default ambient_factor it looks pretty close to retail even with glow sand spec enabled..

Anything under 100 looks far better than the default, really. When I first started using OGL mode I thought it looked like crap compared to D3D, and it was solely because of the default setting for this.

[BlackDove]

I tried D3D and OGL on my Riva TNT2 which is now in the trash pending new computer.

On D3D, before it stopped working with newer builds that were released Q4 of 2005, the game did look prettier, and rendered better on screen than with OGL. Ambient factor regardless.

It's hard to explain the difference. It had a lot to do with the edges being drawn nicely in D3D while always sort of... *shifting* in OGL. OGL was stable though, rendered exactly like retail (when I say rendered, I mean behaved exactly as retail did, of course, not with the added graphical functions) D3D crashed with anything near-complex on screen. But it did look prettier.

I ended up using OGL though, no crashings and better FPS was far preferable to a more polished look in the game, considering the ancientness of the card.

At any rate, sounds like it'd be a good idea to drop D3D alltogether. No hassle with the end-users, no hassle with the coders. Simplification = good.

Just my 2 cents.

[StratComm]

I think all of the "D3D is better than OGL" topics all boil down to the fact that D3D does and has always done better with texture scaling than OpenGL in almost all standard driver packages.  I don't know why, but there are a ton of games that exhibit the exact same behavior.  And the problem is old; it's ultimately very similar to the super-low-res texture bug in HW1, only affecting maps scaled down rather than maps scaled up.

[Nix]

Well, what a goof I've been for the past little while.  I didn't have specular turned on in the launcher, so I enabled it and started playing, I have the nicer colored lighting that I thought ATI users couldnt' have.  That, and I think a long time ago I heard that specular was a huge performance hit, so I left it off.  I've got it on now and everything plays quite smoothly, and looks much better.