This is the part of the thread where I make a big wall of text
and you are going to read it if you wish to post your opinion. None of this "tl;dr" crap, OK? "tl;dr" is for people who wish to remain completely stupid and not learn anything.
The current engine is based on Ken Silverman's VOXLAP engine. Unfortunately, since said engine is by Ken Silverman, there are two nasty issues here.
- The engine will not compile on anything other than the compiler he's using without butchering the utter crap out of it - in this case, MSVC++. This makes it nigh impossible to port to anything that isn't Windows.
- Ken Silverman loves assembler. Ben Aksoy, on the other hand, hates it (I think). Assembler has the advantage of being fast, at the cost of being extremely difficult for the average BSc to maintain, essentially being a black box. On top of this, assembler limits one to a single CPU architecture; in this case, 32-bit x86. (64-bit x86 OSes can run this in 32-bit compatibility mode, but they cannot take advantage of 64-bit code with this.)
There are also benefits to the OpenGL client.
- OpenGL is hardware accelerated. VOXLAP, while using rather fast CPU code, is essentially tied down to the fact that CPUs just aren't good at 3D rendering (which should explain why all the cubes are of a solid colour).
- Making a renderer in OpenGL is easier than modifying VOXLAP. (Heck, maybe even if you use OpenGL 3. But nothing by Intel supports that.)
- From my understanding, it's a mix of C and Python (maybe even C++, but I'm not going to be the one porting it to not-Windows). Not only is this easy to code in (well Python at least), but the use of Python should open it up to some interesting modding opportunities (read: custom guns that are more than just a gfx/sfx swap)
- Unlike VOXLAP, OpenGL is likely to get better as the years go by.
So, for those of you who didn't read anything I just said,
read it you lazy kid. You might learn something.Anyhow, in short:
This is not merely a graphical improvement.This will not be a togglable option, much like that bloody slow font renderer, but unlike that font renderer I personally believe this will be an improvement for most.
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"The lighting which I saw on the people during the fly around might also cause lagging, a toggle should be added for this."
I think this is due to me giving mat^2 a few shaders from my untouched-for-a-few-months-now-
and-not-exactly-working AoS clone.
If that's the case, then there's two things to note. One, it should be easy to turn off, although for gameplay reasons it might not be disablable. And two, it's not based on any proper scene lighting; it just uses two "lights", one from the player and one from a given direction.
mat^2, you might want to give the official word on this one.