Comment by amlib
11 days ago
You said it's compatible with hardware from 15 years ago, but one of the examples have the graphical complexity of half-life from about 25 years ago, could this engine be optimized further to run on hardware from that vintage or at least closer to? Would be pretty cool making games that can run on a Ryzen 9950x 32 thread monster but scale all the way down to a 1Ghz Pentium III and a Voodoo 3.
The oldest computer that I have tried running this engine is a HP laptop from 2008, running a 32-bit version of Windows XP.
It seemed to work fine, but I did have some issues with the Direct3D 9 renderer. The renderer works fine on other computers, so I have no idea if it's a driver bug (Intel tends to have buggy drivers) or if it's a bug on my part.
The biggest problem with using old hardware is drivers. Older drivers will only work on older operating systems and it's difficult to find C++20 compilers that will work on them.
You can use modern MSVC or Clang with an old C runtime/Windows SDK. It's a pain in the ass since new compilers are way stricter with what they compile, so you get a bunch of warnings, but it will work.