   It's so high tech I can't even play it!
  NOTE: Not sure this forum is where this post belongs, so we'll see if the mod. moves it or not.Just thinking about something, while playing a little Morrowind (I dunno if I'm not-so-old school, or cheap, or whatever), when seeing warning boxes relating pixel-shading problems (and their results effects in game) since my computer was obviously not designed to run such a program (about a year-old-laptop).Well, I was just thinking about graphics and stuff (still playing with OpenGL, made nice particle effects, not doing quite well) and wondering as to the feasibility of making games provide some alternative to uber-awesome "see-the-realtime shadows under pimples on the face of your character".  Can't games provide some separate rendering method (like an animated gif or something for the top of the water), for those of us who don't have hundreds of dollars to spare on the latest GeForce?Is such an idea even feasible (I'm going to include a system to allow users to turn particle effect resource use down, or possibly off), and if so if anyone has had any success with this? To me, it seemed that until relatively recently games allowed better control of graphics quality (not just resolution, but detail quality, etc.).  Do game makers now think that the graphics-quality are so essential to the game, that people won't play it if it doesn't look like a tech-demo?   
  Some games take the time to develop lower quality stuff, some don't.  It really just depends on the developer and the engine. A lot of major engines out there are very scalable.  Games like Half-Life 2 can use the last couple versions of Direct X (back to 8.0 iirc).  You will see a loss of quality dropping back to those, but it should run.Other games just give you the ability to scale back a lot of higher end graphics options, like using earlier shader versions, or quality of models, textures, etc.   ;  The only thing that ever seems to help with FPS on higher end games is lowering the resolution :(   ;  I'm not exactly a professional game programmer... but in all my projects I keep A LOT of variables on all kinds of stuff: particle amount, lights, shadows, reflections, etc... The reason for this is quite simple:While I'm at home - I do programming on my stationary PC....While at work - I do programming on my laptop.My laptop isn't exactly state of the art, but using the same code for different machines is a great advantage.So it isn't only for playing that lowering detail can be useful! And in the end... learning to make an entertaining game without all the bells and whistles is the real challenge... not adding lots of eye candy! ;)   ;  You're playing Morrowind (a game released over 4 years ago) on a 1 year old laptop and it's not working correctly? Either your laptop is a real PoS or you've got some driver problems or something, according to the website the game supports a TNT2 so a one year old laptop should be able to run it. Chances are you've got some shitty integrated Intel graphics with buggy drivers.   ;  Tomb Raider: Legends went quite far in this: they created 'normal' content, and 'high-end' content. A bit sad really, because I never got to see the high-end stuff, but it sure costed a lot of development time. Time I had rather seen spend on extending the levels and tweaking the gameplay some more. It wasn't a bad game, not at all, but I felt all that high-end stuff was way overdone - the normal content looked pretty good to me already anyway.So, it's possible, but the question is: do you want to pay the price for it?   ;  Most games do provide fallback, but only to some extend, if it takes too much effort to provide the fallback they won't unless the majority will benefit from it. For instance they rarely provide software rasterizers, because so much would need to be coded that they would lose money. Also supporting both shaders and the FFP can be very hard and will cost many money, much more than will be made by the x people with Intel integrated graphics. So of course it's possible, but a shader-driven system would need an entirely different design from a FFP-driven system.   ;Quote:Original post by mattnewportYou're playing Morrowind (a game released over 4 years ago) on a 1 year old laptop and it's not working correctly?Er, if he got a warning stating something about pixel shaders I'm pretty sure he's talking about Oblivion...;  I'm pretty sure Morrowind used pixel shaders for things like the water. Could be wrong though. It would make more sense that he's having problems if he's talking about Oblivion.   ;Quote:Original post by mattnewportI'm pretty sure Morrowind used pixel shaders for things like the water. Could be wrong though. It would make more sense that he's having problems if he's talking about Oblivion.There was a shader version of Morrowinds water, but if your video card didn't support shaders it would default to a basic water texture during setup (before the game even loaded).  I'd be surprised if it was spitting out errors over that.With Oblivion, they released the patch recently with its "extra low" quality graphics setting, and instead of finding a good way to make the graphics lower, they seriously just went crap with them.  No texture blending on the ground, so the terrain is this patchwork of square crap-units.  No lighting, on objects (such as buildings) so the city glows in the dark.Yeah, it looks bad.   