Continued from here, but pulled out into a separate topic because I think it’s important and want a few more replies - how do you go about deciding on minimum and target hardware and JVM for your games?
Pretty much all my stuff has been lowest-common denominator - Java 1.4 and basic OpenGL 1.1. That covers pretty much any pc you’ll see in the wild today - even laptops and budget computers with those crappy integrated intel chips. However I’m increasingly feeling restricted by this, but I’m not sure whether it’s a good idea to up the requirements. Sometimes it’s possible to have multiple paths which produce the same output (like with FBOs), but when you start getting into shaders it usually becomes impossible to have a GL1.1 fallback which looks the same.
Now if I was someone like Cas and charging for them, then it would probably make good business sense to stick with the current lowest common denominator. But since I’m not maybe I’m restricting myself unnecessarily. Switching to Java 1.5 would certainly make some areas of the code much cleaner, but is it worth loosing X amount of players for? Similarly for shaders, theres a whole lot of cool stuff that can be done even really simple shaders, and it seems a shame to miss out on using them. On the one hand, if you’ve got a crappy integrated intel chip I think you shouldn’t expect to play any games on it, but I suspect people who actually own them would feel differently.
I suspect everyone has different motivations and compromises they make in this area, so I’d be very interested in hearing how others pick and choose what to have as a minimum baseline and why.
/rambling
Since it is a pentium m 1,7Ghz with an ati X700 chip, the requirements might be a little high for everyone, but I am alone and can’t effort taking the time to fine tune on low end hardware. I just hope there are enough players out there with a decent hardware to run my game.