Is it time to start requiring shaders?

[Guest]

I'd just put the eclipse shader in the "medium" or "high" quality setting and leave it at that.Wouldn't it better to have it as a separate flag? In my setup it's the only shader effect that gives problems. I don't want to accidentally disable other effects.

[robn]

Possibly. Depends what else ends up in those categories. Right now we don't have enough shader variation to really warrant any changes to settings, but I expect we will.

[fluffyfreak]

I suppose eventually we can have a shader config screen with a simple quality slider and checkboxes for custom settings - for now though, a simple toggle button to enable or disable it and disable by default for certain makes of GPU (Intel).

[Guest]

Ok, it looks pretty clear that most people can cope with shaders, and turning the eclipse effect off helps a lot for people using machines with little graphics power. The extra development effort required to maintain a shader-free graphics implementation that very few people use does not seem worthwhile. So, we have a decision: We will remove the legacy (shader-free) graphics code. Exactly when that happens depends on when someone finds time to go through and rip it all out, but I would guess it'll be done within a couple of months from now. I would still like to hear from the two people who've said the game is unplayable with shaders enabled. Perhaps we can find some other way to fix the game so that you can run it with shaders enabled. Specific questions: Does the game not run at all, or does it run but with performance too bad to play? Is it still unplayable with the eclipse effect turned off? What graphics card/chip do you have? John B