Opinion was: Re: [SDL] Portability versus the "Gee Whiz" factor

[Bob Pendleton]

Steven James Stapleton wrote:
> I'd think about buying it, but...
> 
> -opinion here-
> 
> why not have it be able to run in both? there are commercial games that
> attempt that.

For me the answer is that I don't like the trade offs. If the game is 
designed so that it can be run reasonably using software rendering, why 
bother with hardware rendering? The difference in rendering capacity 
between even a poor 3D card and a fast CPU is large enough to force the 
game to be designed for software rendering. That effect the object 
count, the number of visible polygons, the choice of HLHSR algorithms, 
the quality of the base art, the complexity of levels, and many other 
things I haven't listed. It just isn't easy to design a game that looks 
good and is playable under software rendering that really takes 
advantage of hardware rendering.

		Bob P.

> 
> -Jim
> 
> 
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> http://www.libsdl.org/mailman/listinfo/sdl
> 


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+ Bob Pendleton, an experienced C/C++/Java +
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