Idea for old hardware

[inukaze]

Hi there . well i post here some suggestions

Yesterday i had download the lastest version of STK , i can't play it fine , because my graphics card don'ts support OpenGL 3.1 .

For Example , for the people with and old hardware can play this game , with the new features and
bugs / issues fixes , updated version . and not send the indirect message "Buy a new pc , because you pc is too old for our game (this is an automatic inference) , you talk to the user inderectly "Buy new hardware supported by us , for you can play it fine" .

But in some parts of the world , and its strange levels of economy , buy a new computer can be very expensive , and can be too old for be supported for the new engines of games" because the parts of hardware for the world are not the most updated for some areas. but that's its not a reason for exclude people .


Why in the Options , dont exist ?
"Engine -> Old , New" , "OpenGL Version : 1.1 , 1.2 , 2.0 , 2.1 , 3.0 , 3.1," ( like in KDE Desktop , you can set the OpenGL Version in Options )
"Graphics Quality -> Simple (Fastest) , Normal (Good) , Beautiful (Maximum) [ Like some steam games , like Arma Tactics , Sparkle 2 Evo , etc ]

I can play STK Perfectly with 0.7.3 , but with the 0.8.1 i have some Glitches ( some characters during the race are invisible or part of the kart )
the 0.9.2 i can't play it fine , i can start the race , but i can't see objets like Karts , another players , and when skidded , in the "Fire" , i see a "Black Blocks"

For the next "Stable" Version , or the version "1.0" of STK , this options can be available , for the people with old hardware , or hardware like netbooks for example "Canaimita" Model : MG101A3 , can play fine ???

[Auria]

Hi,

we understand that not everyone can have the latest computer. OpenGL 3.1 was released in 2009 though, that was 6 years ago, so I don't think it's an unreasonable requirement

The reason for requiring this is because we are a small team and we just don't have the manpower to support both old and new OpenGL, which are quite different : so it's not as simple as just adding a few configuration options, the engine would need to be completely different. We have made a major effort to keep the game running on lower-end configs like HD3000 intel chips, which most commercial games don't support at all.

That being said, we are aware that STK is not as optimised as it should, and we do intend to keep working to improve the performance of STK. Supporting a 10-year-old OpenGL version seems very unlikely to happen, however, sorry

[eugeneloza]

my graphics card doesn't support OpenGL 3.1.

What is the graphic card model? Try to update the drivers / OS. Might work to some extent.
P.S. I have ATI Radeon HD 5400 Series and it runs with some non-critical glitches notifying me to update the drivers. However, I don't play STK that much.

[deve]

This problem is more complex. For example I have one old laptop with intel 965gm graphics card (gen4). It has OpenGL 2.1. In theory it should display warning about OpenGL version, but it game should start. Unfortunately intel driver has a bug and it simply crashes. Last driver version has been released in 2008 and there is no hopes for solving this. Atm. intel simply doesn't really care about anything older than ivybridge.

Support OpenGL 2.1 would be great because it is a kind of standard and almost every graphics card supports it. But as Auria said this would be too much of work. Every modification in our OpenGL 3 engine will potentially break it. And we would need someone who want to support it, because we are all busy with other things.

And still graphics cards which don't support OpenGL 3.1 are probably too weak to run our new tracks, which have much more models/details, even with lower settings.

[samuncle]

And still graphics cards which don't support OpenGL 3.1 are probably too weak to run our new tracks, which have much more models/details, even with lower settings.

Yep, even if it was working with OpenGL 2.x it won't work with the newer tracks (Cocoa Temple etc). It will be like porting them to 0.8.1 and since we reduce the amount of poly etc they will look similar to the 0.8.1 tracks !

If you have an older hardware you should use the old version or port the tracks to the older one but we won't do it because we don't have time.

AS auria said a lot of games currently aren't supporting old hardware like Ogl 2.x, so it's already very cool we got a version that support older hardware.

Sam

[onpon4]

In theory it should display warning about OpenGL version, but it game should start. Unfortunately intel driver has a bug and it simply crashes. Last driver version has been released in 2008 and there is no hopes for solving this. Atm. intel simply doesn't really care about anything older than ivybridge.

I don't know about whatever system you use, but the Linux drivers for Intel GPUs prior to Skylake and Broxton are libre, so if there's a bug in them, you can fix it yourself. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if someone already fixed it.

[deve]

I meant windows driver. On linux I still see that they occasionally fix something for older hardware. And STK works on linux with this graphics card

[charlie]

*cough cough cough* STK Classic!!! The last STK release before the bump to OpenGL 3.1 should be re-released as STK Classic 1.0 IMHO.

[Arthur]

Why? What does it matter what it's called, it's easy to download older releases from SourceForge.

[charlie]

Why? What does it matter what it's called, it's easy to download older releases from SourceForge.

It is! However... how does somebody new to STK know that? They come, they download STK 0.9, discover their computer is not good enough, not even close, and spend a lot of time either figuring this out from browsing the forum or by asking (and many have). It's not exactly informative and straight to the point.

Or... they come to the STK website and see STK and STK Classic, which is clearly labelled as the version of STK that will run on older hardware. No confusion, no frustration, clear and easy and everybody is happy.

[leilei]

Instead of a whole separate version I think an additional "legacy" renderer module would be a better idea. And by legacy I mean GL 1.x, support for 16-bit color, 3dfx Voodoo compatibility, etc etc.

The game's assets wouldn't be a problem for it really, though it would help to swizzle things down to comfortable texture sizes and pages, and the game already doesn't look too "advanced" to not go on a standard vertexlit path. If you still really wanted the bump stuff you could have an ARB shader for that, which is far faster than GLSL for old hardware like the mentioned Intel GMA up there, and even the GeforceFX.

making LOD meshes would also have to be important for this.

[Auria]

Sorry, but while this is not technically impossible, it is not a small task and we would need a new full time developer to work exclusively on that. Until someone volunteers to do it, it's not very likely to happen

[hiker]

*cough cough cough* STK Classic!!! The last STK release before the bump to OpenGL 3.1 should be re-released as STK Classic 1.0 IMHO.

Releasing this official on the STK web page would (for people who don't follow the progress of STK) indicate that we support it. Not to mention the additional overhead of maintaining two addon servers (or managing different versions of addons in one server, which we can already partially do).

Don't get me wrong, I would love if someone picked up an older version and maintained it

Cheers,
Joerg

[Akien]

*cough cough cough* STK Classic!!! The last STK release before the bump to OpenGL 3.1 should be re-released as STK Classic 1.0 IMHO.

Releasing this official on the STK web page would (for people who don't follow the progress of STK) indicate that we support it. Not to mention the additional overhead of maintaining two addon servers (or managing different versions of addons in one server, which we can already partially do).

Deve has a branch with bug fixes for 0.8.1 [1], and IIRC he was not against the idea of helping support a potential STK Classic or STK Legacy.
I think providing a new legacy version based on this fork, that would live in its own repo (i.e. its bug reports should not be made in the main stk-code which should focus on going forward), could be pretty interesting. Then you'd have to make it clear in the website and in the repo's readme that this version is only meant for people who can't or don't want to play more recent versions, but that players should not expect much development, bug fixes or new addons. I don't think setting up a legacy addon server would be needed, the base game would already be good enough IMO; if people want both the main game and addons really badly, then they can start considering buying new hardware

[1] https://github.com/deveee/supertuxkart-0.8.1-updates

[NaN]

Would love to see STK Classic/Legacy, still have some legacy GL 2.1 hardware around here. :P

Are the old addons available for manual download from somewhere, could be just pushed to sf or github?

[Arthur]

It is! However... how does somebody new to STK know that? They come, they download STK 0.9, discover their computer is not good enough, not even close, and spend a lot of time either figuring this out from browsing the forum or by asking (and many have). It's not exactly informative and straight to the point.

Or... they come to the STK website and see STK and STK Classic, which is clearly labelled as the version of STK that will run on older hardware. No confusion, no frustration, clear and easy and everybody is happy.

True, but we already have this, called TuxKart. I remember I played it with software rendering (not sure) while TORCS was unplayable due to needing either hardware acceleration or a newer GL version.

TuxKart has ultimate compatibility and is still packaged in several Linux distros.

[charlie]

True, but we already have this, called TuxKart. I remember I played it with software rendering (not sure) while TORCS was unplayable due to needing either hardware acceleration or a newer GL version.

TuxKart has ultimate compatibility and is still packaged in several Linux distros.

TuxKart is hideously old and not fun at all. STK did a great job of turning it into a fun game with fun tracks, and 0.8.1 was a very well-liked release.

[Arthur]

Well where's the cutoff... we'd still get someone wanting GL 1.4 support, we actually had someone within the last couple days with that kind of hardware wondering why the game didn't work. Anyway, it's all moot unless someone wants to support a more backwards-compatible version. If we had triple the current manpower I'd be all for it.

[Eldermê]

I am currently working on refactoring the engine. I'm trying to move rendering functions from the "god object" irr_driver to a dedicated ShaderBasedRendering class. My priority is to write a cleaner code which works with the new OpenGL 3 pipeline.

It will be easier to add a legacy renderer after this refactoring step. It should be in another class with an AbstractRenderer interface, so future modifications of our OpenGL 3 renderer should not break it. I think I could add support for OpenGL 2.x hardware without too much extra work: we can reuse existing renderFixed function. However, it would be very basic rendering (no advanced lighting, no shadow).

[hiker]

I am currently working on refactoring the engine. I'm trying to move rendering functions from the "god object" irr_driver to a dedicated ShaderBasedRendering class. My priority is to write a cleaner code which works with the new OpenGL 3 pipeline.

It will be easier to add a legacy renderer after this refactoring step. It should be in another class with an AbstractRenderer interface, so future modifications of our OpenGL 3 renderer should not break it. I think I could add support for OpenGL 2.x hardware without too much extra work: we can reuse existing renderFixed function. However, it would be very basic rendering (no advanced lighting, no shadow).

For the record, the old fixed pipeline rendering seems to work mostly last time I tried (except rendering to texture, which affects e.g. the kart selection screen). But it does not really solve the related problem that our tracks will be "too heavy" (too many vertices. We can already dynamically scale down textures, so that might not be too bad) for older cards. We have t a ticket (https://github.com/supertuxkart/stk-code/issues/2046) to improve that, and while the implementation won't be that much work, it's a lot of work for artists, and the art side is still a major bottle neck for us.

Cheers,
Joerg

[charlie]

Well where's the cutoff... we'd still get someone wanting GL 1.4 support, we actually had someone within the last couple days with that kind of hardware wondering why the game didn't work. Anyway, it's all moot unless someone wants to support a more backwards-compatible version. If we had triple the current manpower I'd be all for it.

Somebody was supporting it. He got ignored.

[Snake]

It would be nice for OpenGL 2.1 support which is the maximum OpenGL version my video card supports. Which is a ATI Radeon 9550. I used to have Debian 8.1 installed on this computer and whichever version of STK is on that, it ran perfect on my computer with that video card. I reinstalled Windows XP cause I missed my games and i downloaded STK 0.9 and sadly it didn't work. Kept crashing with the error that STK has stopped working or something along those lines. Because of the video card I'm assuming. The offending DLL was a GL DLL file.

I'm gonna try to download an older version of STK once I figure out which ever version was the last one to support OpenGL 2.1...