I could try to run VO on my graphite iMac DV SE, only I'm not really in the mood to unearth it.

Go with the flow, says I.

Yeah I know (dinosaur part)... :(

When do we get iphone support? :D

People who bought the said intel chipset laptops who are knowledgeable enough to install Linux on them will have probably read up on the gpu performance of the said laptops and decided games would not be something they would be doing.

Four years ago I spent a little over £1,000 on a Dell laptop with an Intel chipset, and I made damn sure it came with an nVidia 6800 and a 1920x1200 screen. Nowdays such a configuration on a laptop is somewhat dated and is probably much more affordable, so anyone who actually wants to play games on a laptop can easily get a laptop that is capable of playing games.

EDIT: Turns out you can't, but you *can* for the same money get a laptop with a Core2 (instead of a single core Centrino on the 4 year old thing) and a 8700 GPU instead of the 6800. Dell will even paint it Serco Red, Itani Blue or Pirate Grey for free.

about a year ago i managed to get the game to run on a pentium 2, 450mhz box with i think 128mb of ram, might have been 196. it only had a 16mb card. granted it only ran at like 15fps, but for just moving a to b, it worked.

is posible play VO with a intel mobile graphic card under windows? because i have some issues under linux and if is necesary i will install window$ .... sigh

Still plays fine on my integrated intel graphics (945GSE) laptop and arch linux as of latest update :)

neomoriar: It should work, if you disable all shaders and really scale down the texture size (like, try using the "64MB" visual quality settings). We're trying to come up with some better default settings and workarounds for Intel chips, but we're kind of flying blind right now, there are quite a few different ones and different broken drivers.

yes, fixed tc=0 and doshaders=0 thanks Incarnate ;)

Is there a plan to fix large ice-yo's in this update? cos they kind of look weird on my new GPU and screen setup >.> which is 2x HD 3870's with a 1680x1050 screen, all settings maxed. Posted direct links to .png's rather than converting and embedding so there's no post-processng.

http://vo-noobs.com/stuff/dump0000.png
http://vo-noobs.com/stuff/dump0001.png

That's not how they are supposed to look?

I've got one of those original G3 iMacs (albeit, a white one), but honestly, if I ever have the money to re-subscribe, I'm getting a new computer to play VO first.

Do you need me to circle the areas that are bad, or would you prefer a vid spuck?

That is how they're supposed to look, yes the EMBM shader we use is a bit dated and the coordinates look stretched. Yes, there is a plan to update them (not tonight), I consider the ice (along with some of the effects/sprites and some background stuff) to be one of the few remaining major eyesores in the game.

However, the "ice redux" will take some time.. quite a bit of my time (and potentially some of Ray's, to do what I really want). And I'd prefer to get back to some gameplay stuff and at least get that rolling, before I bite off another graphics-update thing.

Plus, I haven't even finished this graphics update. Most of the "core/critical" stuff will appear tonight, assuming nothing bad happens. But there are some other areas (station components, the Leviathan, blah blah) that could really stand to be compressed, and I probably won't get to them by this evening.

Cool, as long as long as you know they look like crap too, thats ok.

[edit]

Maybe make them 70% transparent!

No, that would slow stuff down significantly, especially for older hardware, even worse when rendering several different transparent ice crystals on top of one another. Plus the amount of overdraw would be crazy.

The path we're going to take is good and far better optimized for those cases. I just.. don't have time right now.

yea it would slow the hell out of things, but man it would be cool. too bad it couldn't be something you could turn off if you're hardware couldn't handle it. I kinda suspect only current top-of-the-line stuff could do it now at a reasonable frame rate.

man, why don't you just ask him to make ice refractive while you're at it?

lmao refractive ice, actually that would make little sense, i doubt that the ice would be that clean (though anything's possible).

Refractive or reflective? And, if the latter, diffuse or specular?

I'm unsure about ice in space, but wouldn't it be clean enough regardless if it were contiguous, owing to its crystalline structure?