To old GL or not to old GL

Still working on the space trading sim and have finally got around to writing the basics of the 3D graphics engine. But there's one thing I can't decide on. Whether I should support legacy GL for older GPU's? Now apart from the extra work it really has only 1 downside, it will look really shitty compared to the Gl 3.3+ version. I also don't know if people would want the option. But if people would it would be easier to start adding it in now than later.

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Rydian
Depends on your target user base. Many people I've seen playing those games are older (like 30-40) and while a few are hardware nuts and run 4 video cards, some run on older hardware.
 
cwstjdenobs
Ah right yes, I've just done a search on this and I'd pretty much be ruling out anything with onboard graphics. I'm actually surprised by that.

The age range thing is a problem that's being worrying me a bit. I don't want to push the older crowd out but some mechanism that allows play to be more immediate than most of these things is a definite must. I'm really thinking that can be sorted by the right choice of FTL though TBH. Things like time compression are a definite no no.
 
cwstjdenobs
Wow thanks for that link. Totally bookmarked and it's actually put my mind at rest a bit. It looks like 70% of people who play games on the PC (I'm making the presumption that Steam users are a very representative sample) have something of about the GeForce 8 series quality or better. But that still means there's 30% who need a fixed pipeline implementation.

I've also being told by quite a few people that some ATIs cards still have very crappy or no OGL support at all so a DX option will probably be needed at some point.
 
Rydian
Steam is a good representation, considering they also deal with 2D games like Terraria and all that jazz, so yeah everybody loves their hardware surveys.

ATI/AMD cards are what's used on macbook pros (at least not and a few times in the past), and considering that WoW runs with a GL renderer on OSX I'm not so sure on that rumor.
 

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