We wish to deprecate the vanilla renderer. It uses very old code, is annoying to maintain, and in the end, limits the number of features we can add if we want to remain consistent between the renderers. Before we deprecate the renderer, we want to take a poll of how much the vanilla renderer is actually used. The vanilla renderer will be dropped regardless, but based on use, we may decide to drop it later. So, let us know whether or not you use it.
Vanilla Renderer
Re: Vanilla Renderer
To those who use it for performance reasons:
It's fully possible to turn off all the fancy GL3 effects, even normal mapping. You can get roughly around the same frame rate on GL3 compared to vanilla most of the time. There are some surprisingly ancient graphics cards that support GL3, and I was able to run it with my crappy 6150 SE. If your graphics card can't run GL3, you may want to consider purchasing hardware more recent than something made early last decade. Our beta is going to come out in a year or two and our stable release will be made sometime after that, and we cannot realistically expect to support hardware from the early 2000s circa 2020.
Re: Vanilla Renderer
This may help devs decide which GL extensions are safe...
Link: OpenGL capabilities database
(Info about 0 A.D. players' hardware)
Re: Vanilla Renderer
For those who use the vanilla renderer, could you explain why, and also post your hardware.