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Localizing High-End Games for Low-End Machines
CowboyRobot writes "Intel engineer Dean Macri has an article at ACM Queue listing the challenges in designing PC games that will run on very different processors.
PCs vary widely in their performance, and if game developers design only for the high-end, they limit their market.
The article lists specific tips on how to guarantee that even old slow machine can run new games, such as 'the number of triangles used to create the trunks and branches could vary based on the available processor and graphics hardware performance', 'replace the clothing on characters in a game with actual geometry that separates the clothes from the underlying character model', and for simulating ocean waves, having low-end systems rely on basic sine waves while higher-end machines use more sophisticated methods."
The keyword is "graceful degradation". Take away the elements that contribute to the "wow factor" for the power user but the low-power user won't really miss.
.ini files.
It looks like the developer is trying to balance 'wow' vs playability.
It's nice to see things like this "MinDesiredFrameRate= in game
This is not a dream, not a dream...we are transmitting from the year 1-9-9-9.
It would appear that any sort of software emulation used to support this would be in violation of Nintendo's new patent. Reading through the patent (at least, what I could get through the legalese), they claim rights over software that emulates higher end systems on lower end systems (in their case, playing current games on handhelds or cell phones, etc.). Just a thought.