This not a joke.
Fisrt, STK is a great opensource game available on open system like GNU/linux.
This means a lot of people can benefit, specially poor ones, using cheap/old hardware.
When you play 3d games with cheap hardware, the best result is to down resolution to 640x480 and use better graphic effect, and/or anti-aliasing.
In addition to have better fps, the result is prettier than low or no effect and high resolution. Really.
It run fast and pretty with a radeonhd5450, on 640x480.
Secondly: some people still play games on cathodic TV.
That's my main argument.
Yeah, truly, I'm not the only one, but maybe the only one who claims it. Cathodique TV generally don't have more than 640x480.
I just love the result. For players used to it, it looks beautiful because on a cathodic TV, you don't see the pixels at 640x480.
HDMI is now very common and doing this is even more easy, a simple 10€ AV-adaptor do it perfectly to any cathodic TV.
And again you can get a very big and good quality one for free because people just give it.
Free hardware, free system, free 3d games. It's not the only logic in open source project, sure, but I think you shouldn't miss this point.
Yes, it's a social argument.
I wish developers will consider this point of view.
Someone have already tell me, here, "640x480" is not possible because you will not be albe to play, that will breack menus" etc..
I was afraid of that but in fact, sorry but that's absolutely false. I've finish all the games(s) like this, no problem. Ok, sometimes texts and icons deals in a strange way in menus, right, but it's trivial and don't deteriorate the game play.
Actually, you can't use this resolution from game menu.
Here the way I know to use 640x480 anyway: (for GNU/linux but maybe adapted for other os?)
- {l Code}: {l Select All Code}
:~$ supertuxkart --screensize=640x480
same as:
- {l Code}: {l Select All Code}
:~$ supertuxkart -s 640x400
Probably the safest way.
You can also choose full-screen or windowed with -w and -f options (check supertuxkar --help for more).
Make a launcher with your command, and done!
You can also edit the ~/.config/supertuxkart/config-0.10/config.xml file, and search for <Video section, but do it at your own risk.
Jokes aside, if this is true then I agree with this post, libre games should care about accessibility. Sadly they mostly don't, many just want to minic consumerist ways of proprietary games and add features on the detriment of accessibility. I've seen many similar cases of this, e.g. the new versions of Blender completely stopped supporting older versions of OpenGL, killing support for older laptops (which are many times the only ones friendly to 100% free software). There are people who care about this, but they are a minority (spoiler: I may be running a whole wiki about this).
