Software Rendering no longer a choice?

[FonkyFesh]

Whenever I used to start up Ion Fury, I'd get an EDuke32-style dialog box that would let me choose between OpenGL and software rendering, is that no longer an option anymore?

[Gila]

From what I understand, in Aftershock it was removed because it doesn't work correctly with all the new engine related stuff.

What do you want software rendering for specifically?

[dwtietz]

It isn't an officially recommended or supported way of playing the game anymore, but it can still be set to the software renderer via the console if you really need to (although you shouldn't really need, or want, to do that).

[FonkyFesh]

Why wouldn't I want to? I bought the original game for the 90's Duke 3D vibes. Now the game is laggy, takes so long to load, and the smoothed-out animations and forced OpenGL make it feel too try-hard like Boltgun. The original Ion Fury was perfect in nailing the feel of a Build engine game, but I can't even go back to that as far as I know with this new version.

[Gila]

If you disable shading interpolaion and enable y-shearing, it will look like software rendering. I've played Aftershock on the same PC I played the original, it wasn't laggy at all.

[dwtietz]

Originally posted by FonkyFesh:

... but I can't even go back to that as far as I know with this new version.

Yes you can. I already said that you can do that via the console if you really wanted it to be running with the software renderer. You'd do this with the following command:

setrendermode 0

and you could switch it back to OpenGL with the command:

setrendermode 3

[FonkyFesh]

Originally posted by gila:

If you disable shading interpolaion and enable y-shearing, it will look like software rendering. I've played Aftershock on the same PC I played the original, it wasn't laggy at all.

Do you know the console commands for these?

[FonkyFesh]

Originally posted by dwtietz:

Originally posted by FonkyFesh:

... but I can't even go back to that as far as I know with this new version.

Yes you can. I already said that you can do that via the console if you really wanted it to be running with the software renderer. You'd do this with the following command:

setrendermode 0

and you could switch it back to OpenGL with the command:

setrendermode 3

Thanks!

[oasiz]

Software was removed as a selection since it gives inferior performance and experience in 95% of the configurations. Only some really old AMD APUs and select Intel ones may gain better performance without GL due to how bottlenecked the graphics units are in the first place :)
Regardless, it absolutely suffocates on anything that has large surfaces of transparency, something we wanted to use a bit more with Aftershock.
Even a monster CPU won't really lock a proper FPS on anything above 720p, especially with smoke going around.

However... visually GL now days has virtual parity with software aside from distortions and some blending differences with transparencies.
Pretty much all view distortions/etc.. can be toggled via console to match the old style closer if one wants to.

There are also spots where we just decided to not spend hours on trying to mitigate all of the software rendering glitches so you may find some more sprite leakage than in the base game. But it's also what allowed us to focus on some new/cool things.

All of this leaves us with a mode that runs worse, looks worse and plays worse.
However we do see the niche... Even all of my mapping was done inside software renderer. This is why the console commands exist. We just want to avoid players using it unless they really know what they're in for.

I would be curious to know what GPU you have if you experience major performance issues like that.. If it's one of those old APUs then I've heard similar things.

[Gila]

Originally posted by FonkyFesh:

Originally posted by gila:

If you disable shading interpolaion and enable y-shearing, it will look like software rendering. I've played Aftershock on the same PC I played the original, it wasn't laggy at all.

Do you know the console commands for these?

r_yshearing 1
r_shadeinterpolate 0