LÖVE

Hey folks

Dark Wish is finally 'coming soon', and I've now marked it as such on Steam:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/762630/Dark_Wish/

I've still got a laundry list of things to do, but I'm optimistic that I can hit the release date.

This is an RPG game set in the desert with emphasis on dark humour and a few absurdities thrown in for good measure.

My current release target is Windows (64 bit), but who knows what will happen shortly after.

Cheers.

If you guys want I can PM you some steam keys. You've been a great help over the years to me and other so that's the least I could do. I'm in crunch mode but I can send some keys out next Friday if *anyone* wants one just drop me a PM or post in here.

^ Please don't be shy just hit me up a pm, I need to order the keys a few days beforehand to make sure they arrive.

Update to topic about minium specs: I've check all my systems, and all 3 state they are running LOVE in GL 3.3 Core compatibility.

Even my really old card is running fine, so I've reworked the specs to state this:

"768 MB VRAM required. Also OpenGL 4.1 support (GeForce GTX 460, Radeon R7 240, Intel HD Graphics 4000) Or OpenGl 3.3 with support for at least 10240x10240 texture sizes."

Congratulations on your upcoming Steam release.
Is this a Love2D game? The system requirements look like overkill for this sort of game.

If it is a Löve game, then the OGL 4.1 requirement is literally nuts. (Unless you ffi-d in some features you needed, of course.)

Yea, kind of strange:

Graphics: OpenGL 4.1 support...
DirectX: Version 8.0

Why are both OGL and DX required?

And Dx8 is old as hell, whereas ogl4 is new... i don't get it.

Hey guys

OpenGL 4.1 is listed because I need more than 8K texture size! I know it might sound stupid but I wanted all my main assets in a single texture atlas to virtually eliminate all loading times when in game. OpenGL 4.1 mandates compatibility up to 16,384 size textures.

As it stands there are just under 2,500 images of various sizes from 32x32 to ~512x512. It's fast to load at boot-up and never gets touched again.

As far as I know openGL 3.3 mandates 1k texture sizes?

Problem is there are a lot of assets now. Either way this is a technical limitation in the current version of the engine. Certainly after release I can work on a better system, or just offer a scaling on the textures to fit everything in.

If I can squeeze it down or make the atlas creation dynamic when a map is loaded then the requirement literally drops back to maybe even 2.1. The only reason why I state the opengl version is because I have no idea what g-card people use and what texture sizes they support!

As for direct X, I literally lifted this from SDL because 'SDL 1.2 requires DirectX 7' ? I think I've just been overly cautious with the dx versions, because there isn't much info on this from what I've seen.

From some research I've done with the steam hardware survey, the maximum coverage based on hardware I could possibly get is 70%, that is for a Win 7+ 64bit system with opengl 4.1, 1GB VRAM running at full HD screen size. For example 80 % of steam users have opengl 4.1 compatible cards.

This seems to be very compatible with many systems for initial release. I will of course try to improve this -- I have half the dynamic loading ready but I stopped because Love 11.0 came out and I got side tracked. Now time is a bit tight and I don't want to break anything!

If someone did run the game on a lower gl version the worst that will happen is some black / invisible textures. I think I will most likely try to provide a fix for the texture requirement by release.

drunken_munki wrote: ↑Fri Apr 13, 2018 9:05 pm As for direct X, I literally lifted this from SDL because 'SDL 1.2 requires DirectX 7' ? I think I've just been overly cautious with the dx versions, because there isn't much info on this what what I've seen.

I would clarify that DirectX is only required in Windows. As a Linux user, stating that it requires DirectX <whatever version> would make me think that your game does not support Linux.

pgimeno wrote: ↑Fri Apr 13, 2018 9:42 pm As a Linux user, stating that it requires DirectX <whatever version> would make me think that your game does not support Linux.

Nothing in the code makes the game dependant on windows, BUT only the steam distro has been created for windows 64 bit. I can add distros for linux but the problem I'm having is lack of knowledge.

In my win64 distro I literally use the love exe and dlls copied into the main source folder of the game. You can tell steam to run the exe with a param which I give '.', and voilla steam can boot the game no issues. I prefer this to packaging everythg in a zip or binding to the exe but can't remember what the reason is, though It was important for how I load things in.

I have no idea how to set-up a linux distro, and steam can not sudo to install love. So I'm just an idiot with not enough time.

The game looks pretty cool ... best wishes for your release.

With regards to your texture requirements. Do you need 16k just in one dimension or a square one? Because 16k * 16k in 32bits should require 1GB of VRam without anything left for the OS, framebuffers etc. etc. so you might have a problem on systems with only 1GB of VRam.

Nelvin wrote: ↑Sat Apr 14, 2018 4:08 am The game looks pretty cool ... best wishes for your release.

With regards to your texture requirements. Do you need 16k just in one dimension or a square one? Because 16k * 16k in 32bits should require 1GB of VRam without anything left for the OS, framebuffers etc. etc. so you might have a problem on systems with only 1GB of VRam.

Thank you.

I don't need 16k, but that is what is available in GL 4.1 -- the current main atlas is a square with a var set in the config file to 10240.

This leaves me with approx 20% blank space available for more images or if people start modding and adding new things. So this could be lowered as it stands. The value can be increased to give the rest of the pixels, but as you said this raises the VRAM requirement.

So this should be less than 1GB VRAM on the release version, last I checked with other textures and the ground atlas created on a smaller canvas, something like 600 MB from the love statistics output.


Back to the other topic of the GL 4.1, I've been thinking more about this. My main problems are:

1) I need a large texture atlas, even if I use dynamic loading it is going to be bigger than 1k x 1k

2) Making multiple atlas textures seems redundant and will kill all the perforamance gains that I get with the sprite-batch in the current render pipeline.

3) Open gl 2.1 to 3.3 all mandate 1k texture sizes. This is indecibly hard to commit to, I need some hard number bigger than this to design a system around it. Any number, but I can't find one that is consistant.

4) I can pull the texture limit from the love system stats and go with that, but that makes so many potential problems because I have no idea what these values are unless I inspect every graphics card on the maket.

5) The opengl 4.1 spec was the most sane thing they've ever done, but yet 16k manditory might seem high but that was 2010.