Unvanquished Forum

We are killing the GL1 "vanilla" renderer on our 25th alpha release, which will be this March. This is because of the following reasons:

1.) The vanilla renderer is irritating to maintain and displays things very poorly.
2.) Very few people use it, and the number will only drop over the years as people get newer hardware.
3.) We want to add features to GL3 without having to spend time upgrading two renderers simultaneously.

For the 25th release, we want to add texture compression. This will drastically reduce the file size of image assets. While we have it almost working with GL3 and it will likely be in the 25th release, we do not feel that the vanilla renderer is worth adding it to, and we do not want to distribute two separate asset packs.

However, we will be adding a switch that will allow you to quickly disable all of the GL3 effects (including dynamic lighting and normal mapping), which combined with texture compression should give you comparatively similar performance to the old renderer. That way, if your hardware is weak, you should still be able to play.

From what I heard the new renderer has already been more efficient than the old one when doing the same tasks. Regardless of whether this is true, disabling high poly models and some of the more "advanced" renderer effects should make the game playable on any hardware that runs the new renderer at all, which should apply to most systems you would want to play a shooter on.

Seems like it's time for my to dump my aged netbook.

kharnov wrote:

1.) The vanilla renderer is irritating to maintain and displays things very poorly.

Not strictly true. Yes, there's the maintenance aspect (why maintain two renderers?); but, that aside, it does work well.

2.) Very few people use it, and the number will only drop over the years as people get newer hardware.

It's largely served its purpose now.

On GNU/Linux, using the open-source Radeon drivers, I would suggest a minimum of Linux 3.2 and Mesa 9.2; ideally, Linux 3.11 or later with Mesa 10.0. Recent hardware may require ≥3.12 and/or Mesa git.

Intel GMA is likely to need to have most effects switched off, but is otherwise fine. I think that switching off all but dlights but leaving high-res texturing enabled is sufficient. (This is, of course, subject to testing.)

Open-source nVidia drivers – couldn't say for certain, but I have the impression that they're in roughly the state which radeon (r600g) was in about 2 years ago.