[vos-d] VOS requirements - Downscalability

[Reed Hedges]

S Mattison wrote:
>> An unsorted list of all the thing we want Interreality 3D to do.
> 
> One of the things I had always figured I would attempt to include in
> my operating system which I had wanted to call VOS, is the capability
> to not only downscale to systems which could not support hardware
> rendering (less than 8mb video-ram), but to downscale resolution and
> videoram requirements even further, so that the graphics engine would
> be capable of running on even the earliest pentium1's, and perhaps,
> any 486s or 386s people had kicking around in their basements.


Yes, we should specify (initial) target platforms.  Handhelds? Cell phones?

CrystalSpace contains a Software Renderer.  It has fewer features 
implemented than the hardware renederer, but that's OK.  The main thing 
is that it's not that actively maintained and has very few active users. 
They were thinking of getting rid of it and I was among those who asked 
to keep it.  So we might need to put some work in to CS's software 
renderer if we want to be able to use it in Interreality/3D.

In terms of general platform support I think the current thinking is this:

Client ("Terangreal") support on:
  * Linux, Win 2K, XP and Vista, MacOSX.
  * Any video hardware supported by CS should work adequately. This 
means, basically, all non-rare ATI and nVidia cards of approximately the 
last 5 years.
  * The software renderer should be basically usable on PIII and up? 
(Even if at a low framerate, like 15 or 20 FPS?)  Really simple worlds 
might be usable on slower systems but we shouldn't worry too much about 
them.

Client GUI tools (e.g. editing gui) on basically any platform supported 
by wxWidgets. This includes Windows, Mac, Linux/GTK, some 
embedded/handheld support.

The libaries, server, and command-line tools should be usable on Windows 
using Visual Studio or MinGW, as well as  the most common POSIX 
(Unix-like) systems: including Linux, BSD, MacOSX, Sun. Others?

One oddball idea I've always had is taking some uncommon OS like Amiga 
or some simple, lightweight research project and make essentially an OS 
dedicated to only running VOS apps like the 3D client-- if this has 
measurably superior performance over running on a Big OS like Windows or 
Linux then it would be good for demos (live CD, kiosks, etc.)

Reed