I've made some adjustments to the lower quality modes to make them actually playable again. Right now they dont result in significantly less ram usage (that we can figure out later) but they should result in more appropriate visual and cpu usage.
Try out the Retro mode. I'd suggest setting fullscreen. It doesn't matter what resolution you set it at, it's going to be 640x480.
Since this is a long standing bug (not being able to use it) i put it here. I'd like people to test these modes and make any suggestions (especially suggestions for Retro mode) to make it more appropriate for those settings.
low and retro mode quality settings fix
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safemode
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Coragem
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I tryed it for some minutes.
Planets look nice, reminds me of FFE (Elite3).
I think ships should be wireframe only, if thats possible. OR no reflections. i saw a goddard. no textures but very good (too good) looking lightning.
Images inside bases makes and main menu, navegation only possible using Right click.
(too big in screen just see some very big pixels.)
I dont know if this is possible but instead of those big pixels, bases screens could be Black and white.
Ah, Im getting 30-50 fps using retro mode almost the same as using Extreme detail. but that might have something to do with my computer.
I might try playing again, i liked the crosshair.
Planets look nice, reminds me of FFE (Elite3).
I think ships should be wireframe only, if thats possible. OR no reflections. i saw a goddard. no textures but very good (too good) looking lightning.
Images inside bases makes and main menu, navegation only possible using Right click.
(too big in screen just see some very big pixels.)
I dont know if this is possible but instead of those big pixels, bases screens could be Black and white.
Ah, Im getting 30-50 fps using retro mode almost the same as using Extreme detail. but that might have something to do with my computer.
I might try playing again, i liked the crosshair.
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safemode
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there is a wireframe option, but setting it causes redraws to overlay, rather than refresh. It gets pretty nasty after flying around a while.
Also, since our menus use textures, we'd have to enable wireframe only for meshes, which is currently not possible. Though, it's a cool idea and i have thought of it before. I'd rather prefer to have a small set of textures that are flat colors that, when Retro mode is enabled, we use instead of all other textures (minus menu and other textures with writing). So ships can all be just grey flat panel looking, planets can be blue, stars yellow, bases can be brown or so. Etc.
Your screen resolution should be 640x480, so you shouldn't be scaling the textures too much. There's not much we can do about the ugliness of the menu textures. There's just no way of differentiating a menu texture from a game texture once you get into gl_texture, perhaps at some higher level where we read filenames, we can alter the maxdimension variable for certain filenames, so they get displayed nicer than the rest of the graphics.
30-50fps is crazy low. If you get the same in extreme detail perhaps you're not hardware accelled.
Also, you may want to uncheck shaders when enabling retro mode, As they are not disabled by the mode itself as it is now.
I'll look into the other options related to lighting to try and disable the effects as best as possible for retro mode.
The only other thing i can think of that would be best is trying to get GL to auto render everything in 8bpp mode, without having to convert all the textures into 256 colors on the fly outside of gpu land. That would be cool.
As it is, so long as the text for buttons is not actual text, but just part of the image, and it's not a small image, we are kind of stuck either deciding to keep that image at a higher res (and make some hacks to get the ability to know when we want that) or to downscale everything and make such text unreadable., or barely readable.
I'm not sure why the very main menu text is not done in a way that avoids having text pertinent to the game function stuck in an image. It makes such parts of the game, very dependent on the screen resolution.
Also, since our menus use textures, we'd have to enable wireframe only for meshes, which is currently not possible. Though, it's a cool idea and i have thought of it before. I'd rather prefer to have a small set of textures that are flat colors that, when Retro mode is enabled, we use instead of all other textures (minus menu and other textures with writing). So ships can all be just grey flat panel looking, planets can be blue, stars yellow, bases can be brown or so. Etc.
Your screen resolution should be 640x480, so you shouldn't be scaling the textures too much. There's not much we can do about the ugliness of the menu textures. There's just no way of differentiating a menu texture from a game texture once you get into gl_texture, perhaps at some higher level where we read filenames, we can alter the maxdimension variable for certain filenames, so they get displayed nicer than the rest of the graphics.
30-50fps is crazy low. If you get the same in extreme detail perhaps you're not hardware accelled.
Also, you may want to uncheck shaders when enabling retro mode, As they are not disabled by the mode itself as it is now.
I'll look into the other options related to lighting to try and disable the effects as best as possible for retro mode.
The only other thing i can think of that would be best is trying to get GL to auto render everything in 8bpp mode, without having to convert all the textures into 256 colors on the fly outside of gpu land. That would be cool.
As it is, so long as the text for buttons is not actual text, but just part of the image, and it's not a small image, we are kind of stuck either deciding to keep that image at a higher res (and make some hacks to get the ability to know when we want that) or to downscale everything and make such text unreadable., or barely readable.
I'm not sure why the very main menu text is not done in a way that avoids having text pertinent to the game function stuck in an image. It makes such parts of the game, very dependent on the screen resolution.
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safemode
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Here's an idea that can be fairly easy to implement. I'll create a set of maybe 2 32x32 planet textures, a 16x16 ship texture, a sun 4x4 sun texture, and a 32x32 base texture and a set of 512x512 menu textures. Then hack the python responsible for grepping through the unit's dir and reading the files that say what textures to load and redirecting them to the same low res ship/planet/base textures i'd have made. Then hack the code responsible for loading up the main menu to goto low res main menu.
It's either that or when in retro mode, i turn off compression, have the first mipmap of the dds files get decoded and then resized using the higher quality scaler than the one used to create dds mipmaps-- which weren't intended for close up viewing. Then turn compression back on and have the files compressed dynamically, which should be fast considering they'd all be less than 512x512 ... maybe even 256x256
It's either that or when in retro mode, i turn off compression, have the first mipmap of the dds files get decoded and then resized using the higher quality scaler than the one used to create dds mipmaps-- which weren't intended for close up viewing. Then turn compression back on and have the files compressed dynamically, which should be fast considering they'd all be less than 512x512 ... maybe even 256x256