What rendering systems to support?

[StefanP.MUC]

Currently we ship the game with OpenGL and DirextX 9 support. Ogre 1.8 will also have DirectX11 support (no official DX 10 support however as it seems).

So the question is: What systems should we offer/ship with the game? Stay with these two? Remove DX support completly?

Personally I'd vote for OpenGL-only. This is supported by all operating systems and by all graphic cards/drivers from the last 5 years (at least). This also ensures that the game looks the same on all platforms (DX9 looks slightly different then OpenGL). Another advantage is the reduced amount of DLL files and smaller installer package on Windows.
I'm not sure, but I have the feeling that on my system the OpenGL renderer needs less CPU power compared to the DX9 one. So this could be an argument for OpenGL-only, too.

Any opinions on this?

[oln]

I think we should focus on OpenGL at least. I don't think the DX DLLs are that huge, but I haven't checked. Some windows drivers have crappy OpenGL support. It's only a matter of including or not including anyhow. This also depends on to what extent we start using custom shaders as well. I have noticed that cg support might not allways be present on linux systems (possibly due to patents), so we should avoid depending on that.

[StefanP.MUC]

Currently it's only a matter of including. But after we have our own graphics options menu it will also be a matter of how much options we have to provide and maintain ourselves. OpenGL options are not fully identical to DX options.

I don't even know what cg is. It was already there when I joined the team. Is it this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cg_%28pro ... anguage%29 ? I don't have the option to select it, only OpenGL and DX.

[oln]

It's a shading language. It supports both OpenGL and DX. GLSL only supports OpenGL, HLSL only supports DX. Ogre uses cg by default if it's available. We're not using any custom shaders right now, but if we end up doing it, supporting both DX and OpenGL is a bit more work. (Though converting a shader from one language to the other is reasonably simple as long as it doesn't use any exotic features.)

[svenskmand]

It do not see any reason currently to drop DX from the builds. And I think we should try to use Ogre as much as possible and not use custom effects specific to only GL or DX. Right now we need functionality in the game, and maybe also a better lighting scheme. But advanced effects is for later in my opinion.