Our minimum system hardware requirements have been the same since we released in 2004, and I have NO intention of changing them at this time. That isn't what this thread is about.

Instead, I'm considering dropping hardware that's actually below that list. See, while our stated minimum requirements have always been the relatively slow-but-sane hardware linked above, we've always gone out of our way to maintain support for truly-ancient hardware as well. Partially because, when we released the game in '04, and tried dropping in some Pentium-III specific changes, we found out we had a bunch of people playing on K6-2 CPUs. So we've always been this oddball game that supports not only our minimum requirements, but also some random area below our minimum requirements; which is scarcely able to run the game, but that we continued to quasi-support anyway (when it ran like crap on said machines, we would point to the minimum and say "see!"; but we still tried to include existing players who somehow had the patience to use such ancient hardware).

This is becoming a problem for me. I'm looking at up-rezzing some textures, which effectively requires Texture Compression (a feature of all "Hardware T&L" circa-1999+ video cards listed in the requirements above). We can add software decompression fallbacks, in theory, but then there needs to be specialized code to not just decompress, but drastically scale down any of these newer textures (since they'll have four times the resolution of the current textures, with the same memory footprint for compression-capable cards). It gets to be a lot of work for hardware that, most likely, no one is using and will barely run the game.

Plus, we'd like to possibly drop in some Pentium III specific optimizations, things like SSE-enabled collision detection or physics. Again, this would work fine on all hardware actually listed in our minimum requirements (PIII or Athlon or newer), but for the bizarro people who were using overclocked K6-2s or Pentium2 Celerons or something.. it wouldn't. I don't know if any of these people still exist.

We are not currently looking at dropping G3 support, I know we still have G3 players, so we'll put that off for the time being. It's kind of a bummer for G4 people, since we can't use AltiVec optimizations, but it's ok for now. The changes I'm mentioning above are all x86 (Windows, Linux/32) and Video-Hardware (T&L) specific. The Linux/64 build already requires 64bit-capable CPUs, which are very obviously quite new.

So, coming to the actual point. Does anyone care? Is anyone still playing on an overclocked K6-2 with a Riva TNT2? Or a Pentium II with a Rage 128? Or one of those colorful original G3 iMacs? Those machines would be excluded (the iMac's Rage128 didn't support texture compression, G4+ iMacs are fine), but they could hardly play the game anyway. Plus you have to hack newer OS X to even install it on a G3 iMac. I doubt anyone out there will actually be impacted by this, but I'm asking anyway.

(Yes, the iBook G3 will continue to work, as long as it is new enough to have a Mobility Radeon, preferably the 800+ mhz models)

I'm probably the last person who even pretends to play Vendetta Online on a Rage 128 anymore, and I say... let the poor thing die. It works fine as long as you turn backgrounds off and stare into space... but don't even think about being shot or going into an ion storm or... heaven forbid... a Skirmish.
-:sigma.SB

I used to pretend to play VO on a Rage 128 (grape, and later indigo, iMac G3). I haven't tried that for over two years now. If things can be improved by killing off Rage 128 support, please, take it out behind the barn and put it out of its misery.

*I used to play vo on a celeron with a sis gfx chipset*

Bleh, drop support for crap things, imho, anyone who don't have at least a pixel shader 2.0 should die, then you could make it pretty for all.

I agree with ntli!

My netbook has higher stats then those listed, and I have to play with everything at minimum to have a tolerable experience. My guess is this will (or would if there are any) only affect players in third world countries, people that probably can't afford the low monthly fee anyways :(

This won't affect my netbook (atom n270 + 945GSE) will it?

no

Hrm, I don't remember, and it's running the client fullscreen right now so let's ssh in to check....

--- 1734 ~ C
ssh -Y tria
Password:
Last login: Sun Jun 28 22:10:30 EDT 2009 from clam.sethwklein.net on pts/3
--- 1734 61° 524 ~ T
cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep 'model name'
model name : Pentium II (Deschutes)
--- 1736 61° 524 ~ T

But really, that machine seems to have lost a PCI slot recently and the new one... has a pair of PIII's. Nah, I won't care. I will have to hurry up on setting up the new machine, though!

Edit:

Oh, and I won't care about the video stuff since I'll be moving the video card and....

--- 1744 61° 524 ~ T
lspci | grep VGA
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV11 [GeForce2 MX/MX 400] (rev b2)
--- 1819 60° 524 ~ T

Under linux with my old radeon 9550 texture compression produced some weird artifacts around stars. It looked like some kind of haze that didn't rotate at the same speed as the background. I didn't check that recently .. so maybe it was fixed in the drivers or something.

Otherwise even the shitty VIA chip in my laptop is supposed to support T&L ..if it wouldn't lock up when I run the game.

It's been maybe 10 years since I've used anything that old. Drop it!

I'm using an Athlon 1.14Ghz with a Radeon 9000 card. I don't really get all the jargon so therefore my question: am I one of those you are talking about?

No. You're fine. Well, I mean, your system is a dinosaur. But it's still around 4 years newer than what they're talking about.

omg you mean vendetta wont run on this???



im screwed

Just kill the old hardware support that you mentioned, that's really some ancient stuff.

this is just unacceptable.

so, peytros wont be able to play anymore.

well, we can't allow that.

inc, please, think of the peytros..es.

Well, more information has come to light since I wrote that:

Apparently (some of?) Intel's mobile chips are not exposing texture compression features under Linux/OpenGL. So that's potentially any Intel-graphics laptop or netbook running Linux. We're going to have to do some CPU-decompression/rescaling hack to let those systems work (even on a degraded visual quality level).

Aside from that, thanks for the feedback, all. We'll work towards recompiling for P3 and assuming DXTC (compression) support for the most part. With some sort of "compatibility mode" fallback for GMA945 stuff. Multi-platform PC game development is so exciting..

I just read through this: http://homepage.hispeed.ch/rscheidegger/dri_experimental/s3tc_index.html

It sounds like if you only do decompression, then enabling texture compression is just a matter of flipping some switch. I don't know how up to date that page is though.

haha peytros

Solra, you're not alone! I play on one of the ancient Rage128 Pro iMacs listed above. (well, if you count turning the "backgrounds off and stare into space... avoiding all combat, etc...") But I guess we're freaks. Best to put the poor thing out of it's misery. Besides Mac Mini's don't cost that much (and we're in a recession!)

I doupt my computer is THAT ancient, so sure cut the weird lower-pools-of-stability.
It probably is possible to run VO on an abacus. It'd just take forever since every single calculation would have to be done by hand,you'd have to draw each frame yourself, and some/most/all of it is pretty complex for all I know.. It'd be like VO in single-player brain-bending mode.