I started a devlog - updated 13th of August

[ThreeOhFour]

Finally, a devlog with what everybody wants from me: Boring art theory 

[eri0o]

I noticed the purple around the cursor, if you want to do these types of outlines and you are using ags4, and need to do it dynamically for some reason, these should be doable using shaders. I haven't actually done, but I imagine it should be possible to.

[ThreeOhFour]

At the moments I've kept my experiments with shaders stuff minimal because of a few reasons (such as - if I can get something working in GLSL, then I need to convert it so it can run in Direct 3D, if I make a shader an essential feature, how do people who are running in Software Mode deal with this issue?)

So while I love what possibilities shaders open up, I'm planning to keep them for non essential "nice to have" effects for now I think!

[Crimson Wizard]

if I make a shader an essential feature, how do people who are running in Software Mode deal with this issue?

Is the software mode so actively used to actually consider it?

[ThreeOhFour]

Is the software mode so actively used to actually consider it?

To be honest, I have no idea! In my brief discussion about using shaders with Janet we even wondered if it was possible to disable software rendering to mitigate this issue. The main issue to me is that it seems illogical to release a game with a feature that is essential to gameplay (such as doing UI stuff in shaders) which also has the possibility for an end user to be able to disable those features by selecting a driver that's supported in the setup program.

[Crimson Wizard]

In my brief discussion about using shaders with Janet we even wondered if it was possible to disable software rendering to mitigate this issue. The main issue to me is that it seems illogical to release a game with a feature that is essential to gameplay (such as doing UI stuff in shaders) which also has the possibility for an end user to be able to disable those features by selecting a driver that's supported in the setup program.

A certain driver may be disabled in setup program, as explained in this page of the manual
https://adventuregamestudio.github.io/ags-manual/EngineConfigFile.html

See [disabled] section.

That will remove gfx driver from the list of drivers in setup program, but won't disable it completely inside the engine, meaning if a user goes and edits config file directly, or runs engine with respective command line arguments, then it may still be run in software render mode.

[eri0o]

I think you can detect if it's ran without hardware acceleration and warn the user

https://adventuregamestudio.github.io/ags-manual/System.html#systemhardwareacceleration

[Crimson Wizard]

I suppose that a question here is, whether you need (or want) to support a software renderer in your game, or whether you want to safeguard your players from launching the game in an incompatible mode.