No 3D texture support … 
What the hell IS a 3D texture? And why do I need it?
Ick, 3D texture support required? Thats a harsh requirement that is.
Apart from the fact that they eat texture memory by the truckload, lots of cards will report 3d texture capabilities yet be hideously slow. GeForce 2 and less in particular emulate them in some crazy way that’s dog slow. Even on more powerful cards they’re not the speediest of things. I’ve never really seen a use in games for 3d textures that can’t be much more efficiently rendered with a small collection of 2d textures.
[quote]Ick, 3D texture support required? Thats a harsh requirement that is.
[/quote]
Uh…are these a new name for procedural textures? Gulp; procedural textures on triangle-scanline rendering hardware, nightmare! 
Perhaps this is why it crashed my computer? The 3D textures calls?
Nah, 3d textures are like a big 3d array of colour values instead of a 2d array. Obviously thats not too kind to memory use, and the max size is something like 256x256x256 on pretty much any card.
Worked at home. Rather slow, rather large…
Cas 
Indeed, 3D texture support (volume textures) are by far the most difficult requirement to have to play SG. Might very well explain why most of your systems are slow/crashing.
They are part of OpenGL 1.2 spec, yet as OT said sometimes they’re supported thru software, or generally as an afterthought. For example, I had an old ATI Radeon 8xxx simply ignore the setting and default to one non-depth-animated texture.
I painfully learned a while ago not to assume that an OpenGL1.2-compliant card automatically supports 3D textures, hence I made a utility to detect that capability among gfx cards. However, even tho a driver may say it supports them, it might still be doing it thru software and be, as you say, dog-slow.
As for the why, it makes for great clouds/nebula animations, subtle changes in colors/patterns without having to muck around with vertex colors. Makes my game look pretty unique I think, and my gameplay depends on it. It was a technology gamble from the start, I didn’t know whether or not that feature would become widespread/more supported, not being a graphics expert.
Let this be a lesson to you kids out there, never have your game depend on one specific fruity technology!
BK
Hey, I just saw SG perform on a WinXP-GeForce FX, and sure as hell, the performance was lamentable, far worse than on my GeForce3 (which is an older card). Pretty bizarre. Seems to be very dependant on what card you have, as blah suggested.
BK
spent a squllion years downloading via sucky dial-up then extension failed to validate its security certificate on refused to run.
Mac OS X 1.3.5 Java 1.4.2_05 Update 2
Tried to run the “Requirements Checker” but the Mac OS is not supported by the JNLP file.
Gonna have to fix that before you get Mac testers
@swpalmer
I kinda made that on purpose. I first wanted Linux and Windows users, then I’d concentrate on Mac once I was reasonably sure it worked well on the 2 platforms I can work on directly. Thanks for your interest, I’ll keep it in mind. For now tho it seems I have slightly bigger problems as you may have read the past flurry of negative experiences
One thing that could help ATI users to run the game is the D3D version of J3D, though I need to come up with a hassle-free way of squeezing it thru jnlp instead of OGL.
@kaffiene
The joys of leeching off Sun’s servers. :-/
Athlon 1.1 ghz, Win 2k, ATI Radeion All in Wonder 9600, java 1.5, sound blaster
Ran great, very smooth, fun game.
I ran it on Windows XP SP2 with Java 5 and it loaded fine, played all the music and everything. I clicked Migration and then hit Play, and I thought it was crashing because my resolution went back to what it was previously and some of the items on my desktop started showing, but then the resolution changed again and it went back into the game only with a white screen and nothing else… so I had to close it.
@MickeyB
Thanks for playing, glad you enjoyed it !
@Malohkan
The 3D part of the game is run in a different window, so it’s normal that you see a flickering. I have the same annoying rez change and flicker on my system, but I don’t think that can be helped because I switch back and forth between my Java2D menus and my J3D game arenas. If you see all white all the time, then definitely your card doesn’t support 3D textures. Just to be curious, you could try the requirements checker. If it tells you your card has 3D texture mojo, there’s a chance your system simply can’t handle well the full screen exclusive mode and that the game runs well in windowed mode (here’s to hoping). What’s your gfx card ?
BK
[quote]@swpalmer
I kinda made that on purpose. I first wanted Linux and Windows users, then I’d concentrate on Mac once I was reasonably sure it worked well on the 2 platforms I can work on directly
[/quote]
What does that mean?
Why can’t it work “directly” on Mac?
The only thing I can think of is that the Java3D package must be installed. But that is relatively easy to get from the Apple website. Just provide the link beside the JNLP link.
I must admit I’m also attempting to make sense of my last post. Whether the user in on Win, Linux or Mac makes no difference. Man, I should definitely not write when tired (or think for that matter).
Indeed, the lack of J3D jnlp install on Mac is not a big issue, but it would have been nice from my perspective, one unified way of distrbuting the game. Any idea why Apple isn’t joining the webstart love ?
The jnlp for the game now supports Mac OS X, go for it.
However, the requirements checker still cannot be run on OS X because it needs a bleeding-edge version of J3D (1.3.2, can query 3D texture capabilities) which isn’t available from Apple. Other than that, fingers crossed!
BK
my video card is an Intel 82852/82855 GM/GME Graphics Controller. I believe it claims to support OpenGL 1.2
Malohkan,
At work I have an Intel 82865G Graphics Controller and the game’s arenas appear all white. When I run the requirements checker, it tells me the max 3D texture size supported is 128x128, which is insufficient (I use 256x256). I think you have this same issue more or less.
When the system can’t handle what J3D throws at it, the API disables textures, hence the white. I wish there was a better handling of this scenario, but there isn’t. That’s why there the little utility to go alongside my game.
BK
I ran the checker, and sure enough, I can’t play it