Graphics Update

Ahh...... right.

That explains a lot....

Well you see, my friend, who is a doctor in training, said they'd give me a vasectomy.

about two months later, my girlfriend told me she was pregnant. And well, you know. I'd had a vasectomy, done by my med-student friend. So it was impossible that I was the father....

I guess he must have snipped the wrong bit?

Garat - are a box of chocolates enough in this situation?

Wine, too. Definitely wine. Or scotch.

SCOTCH PARTY ON UBER FORUMS!!!


hmmm, on second thought, all i got handy are the two bottles of cheap vodka I use as cough syrup...

That. was. awesome. Thank you for taking the time to write that out and make all the geeks happy.

the very specific thing i like with skilled developpers is humility. Because after having tested this very last build, i don't know what a miracle is, but as far as i'm concerned the big FPS drop which used to occure while moving hundreds of units has disapeared I'm not saying this will not occure again if playing with a few thousand of units, but the performance has dramatically increased. Another good proof is that so far my gtx770 air cooling system was allways idle. today, in addition to what i would call a big performance update, my gtx770 air cooling system started to make noise i allways prefer numbers to feelings so i will later monitor my gpu activity and compare it to my previous tests, but it's obvious, Varrak, you moved one large step beyhond you rock man

Big gains?. Bit of an understatement. sure i only played on a planet 700 radius last night, But my game loaded INSTANTLY when i pressed ready to go haha and it wasnt like i was sitting in the lobby waiting for it to render the world. it was just in, 4 ai and go. boom ready to play. That felt really good.

Good work on the new Graphics Engine, very good performance gain

Yes but you can't mod a console!

I just hope Uber that seems have work a lot before on consoles understand that many off us like me,dont belive that a console can give you the same gameplay feel that a pc give.

For me consoles are to other kind players ( i respect that since you can find some good games on consoles) but they dont have the same view ,about games then most PcGamers have.

I have gameboy-mastersystem-gamegear-megadrive-playstation 1-playstation 2-playstation 3 and some others all work well -and now i have PS4...Only PC games give me all the pleasure i look on a game.

Wont change PC for nothing!!!

Experimental Planets Load WAAAAAAAAAY Faster
and games also
that's a big+

nice work Varrak.

This was a great update, thanks Varrak! Will be looking forward to trying this build when I get home

Good to hear! had me worried for a minute then to, hehe

Definitely a lot better but still a way to go before it's what I would expect.

or perhaps im overestimating my system...

OpenGl 2.1 support should be dropped completely there are too many code stability issues using the gsl shading language calls for 2.1 along with 3.0. OpenGl 2.1 was released in 2006 its over 6 years old it was good for its time but if your drivers or hardware cannot support opengl 3.0 it cannot run this game at an acceptable performance level.

So we've been very heavily debating whether to drop 2.1 support. The main driver of keeping this is a bunch of macs that don't support anything higher. We came very close to cutting it but I decided to keep it for now. If it becomes too much of a problem we may drop it. I don't really like cutting out customers like that though, I would rather make the set of people who can play bigger than smaller.

damn so macs only support 2.1 I thought with OS 10.7 it would be a little higher openGL support than that since it is a professional workstation os or supposed to be. Well I guess we will have to keep the legacy support, some of the linux opensource drivers have trouble with ogl 3 too. Is there a way to separate the code so you when you set the game on low graphics settings it drops to opengl legacy mode then in the high settings it goes to 3.0 maybe even 4.0 or higher if graphics are set at the highest settings.

In general there is not much hardware that theoretically need GL2.1:
https://developer.apple.com/graphicsimaging/opengl/capabilities/GLInfo_1075.html

Practically many OS X drivers just have pretty bad GL3 support, especially for ATI GPUs.

I doubt those drivers have enough performance to run PA and all newer drivers have GL3 support already.

Currently open drivers have more problems with legacy code because Mesa shader compiler follow standard strictly.

so I wounder what kind of performance these people actually get on those drivers is the game even playable on the old macs that support 2.1 Its hard to believe a bunch of old macs users are actually playing this game on such an obsolete api. Why would you run OS 10.7 or a new game like this on a piece of sh#$t that runs an api over 5 years old.

Because hardware might be high-end even if it's old. Also keep in mind that OpenGL support have about 3 years "lag" on OS X and even if Apple tested new versions support a lot they're still not bug-free. So devs can't just go to newer version because it's will require ton of time on testing and possible even more time to workaround driver bugs.