[Dev] Talk of Making OpenGL 2.1 a Minimum Requirement for Blender

Game Engine Game Engine Support and Discussion
1

There is currently a discussion on Blender’s bf-committers mailing list to make OpenGL 2.1 a minimum requirement for running Blender. This would also affect the BGE (maybe not right away, but eventually). Right now there are very few (if any) voices against bumping the minimum OpenGL version. If you would like to voice an opinion on the mater, I would recommend responding to the mailing list thread.

One of the main advantages for (and why I am in favor of) bumping up the minimum required OpenGL version is we can get rid of code that exists as a fallback to older devices. This simplifies development since we are guaranteed support for certain features (VBOs, shaders, FBOs, etc.).

Pieces of the discussion:
http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2015-January/044821.html
http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2015-January/044877.html (this part of the thread starts as a response to a digest message, so the quoted part has lots of other bits of conversation)

2

On the other hand this would mean the end of multitexture mode.
IIRC there was a discussion about it in the bge forum some time ago but I couldn’t find the thread anymore.

3

Yeah,but is multitexture mode worth keeping,

4

I was very against dropping single texture mode, but since it’s gone, I can’t see anything bad about moving on to GLSL only.
If I want to make a non-GLSL game I’ll use another engine or download blender 2.49b (which is still a good version of Blender GE, very stable).

There’s no two ways about it, multitexture is useless. The lighting doesn’t work properly, animated textures don’t work, nodes don’t work, it’s only good for making games with no lighting. If I’m going to do that, I’d rather go back and use a copy of 2.49b with single texture.

5

Excuse my ignorance but as access to discussion which Moguri refers?

Ops.: I read the news right and found the link in the original prost.:o

6

You could try this -> https://github.com/Sponk/NeoEditor The render supports fixed functions and glsl.

7

Also, won’t this make render call batching, and hardware instancing easier to achieve?

Thank you again Moguri, for all of hour hard work, on threaded animations , hardware armature skinning etc.