Marcel wrote:
Isn't it supposed to produce the effect of shaders without using them? I still see the buildings in their entirety without the ground covering part of the bottom and no shadows on planetary rings. I don't play many games anymore so I don't have many examples for comparison, but I can see heat shimmers and effects in Doom 3 so I know my card can display shaders. I don't think it's worth anyone's effort to get Pioneer to work with my old Radeon 9550, however.
There's different kinds of shaders. Your card may support ARB shaders, but to use them we'd pretty much have to learn GPU assembly language. Nobody uses them anymore. We use GLSL shaders, which are typically only available since OpenGL 2.0. Pioneer does some basic feature tests on start up so the fact that you got the legacy renderer suggests that your card probably can't support it (its not just shaders either).We don't try to make Pioneer produce the effect of shaders without them unless its trivially easy to do. Worst-case we'd end up maintaining two codepaths. The philosophy for shaderless hardware is that the game should be playable without them, but not necessarily pretty. That's exactly why the things you mention (glows and ring shadows) aren't available - they're 100% implemented in shaders. The ground covering the buildings is another, more complex part of using shaders - we do different depth calculations in the shaders that simply cannot be supported without them.
(like all of my suggestions 
)
i post two screenshot which let's you compare and you can see the difference of the final retextured "vbuildings" (i hope vlastan feels ok with it).but if you look at the scenery they fit much better now imho.first the original buildings[attachment=1234:o_vbldg.jpg]now the "retextured" ones, i only changed the texture a little bit to make it seamless, glowmap has been vertically flipped to fit and edited in the same way as the diffuse map (further i reduced the bitdepth of the glowmap from 24 to 8 = 256 palettized, which is far enough for a glowmap imo, and saves at least a little space if not more).the "uv scale" has been almost doubled (sometimes a little more sometimes a little less) and i reached a average floor height of 5m, which is still very high but ok.that has also ment a rework for the lod2 and lod1 bldgs, further i removed the textures from the collision mesh to save a little bandwith.[attachment=1235:n_vbldg.jpg]the vertical mirrored glowmap is best to recognize at the small windows on the low floors of the buildings, if you take a close look you can see on the original blds. the glowing of the windows is under the windows, respectively flipped.further i sunk the blds. in until the groundfloor is now 5m above level, that means that they will sink in on one side sometimes on steep terrains, but steep terrains are anyway gone (to sad, imho) :mrgreen:and a screenshot with marcels "worksuit" 
which is finally a good thing to have as comparison model[attachment=1236:vbld_withzerun.jpg][/hr]i rember this problem even from old SC3K, it took me a long time to find a set of buildings which has fitted to mine, that's because i kept the scale (a "block" in the "BAT" was 3x3x3m, which shows that the devs of the "BAT" had the right idea, each block fits to a average floor height of 3m), many buildings was nicely made but completely out of scale which is annoying then in a completed city.but i also know that even some draughtsmen have problem with the scale, which i really can't imagine...but maybe i'm handicapped because of 25 years of construction working 
But what would the game use them for though? Unless they are just there to look cool?