Finding out the system requirements

Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Beginners Area/Finding out the system requirements

????(Posted 2005) [#1]
How do you find out the system requirements for games you make?


ozak(Posted 2005) [#2]
Take the Blitz3D requirements (DirectX7 etc) and then test it on as many systems as possible. See how it runs, and determine a minimum platform it's playable on.
This is great for optimization too to see if you can get it to run on systems lower than the minimum spec :)


QuickSilva(Posted 2005) [#3]
Just out of interest where can Blitz`s minimum requirements be found now? I seem to remember not being able to locate them on the products page recently.

Jason.


Matty(Posted 2005) [#4]
Blitz's minimum requirements I didn't think were entirely accurate - I had a very low end system a while ago which I could not get the demo to enter the ide for blitz3d (blitzplus/blitzbasic worked fine) yet it met the requirements and exceeded some other people's machines here who also use blitz3d. On my newer low end system it works fine, although I couldn't pick just 1 thing that may have prevented it working on my old system.

Anyway, back on topic - as ozak says - you will have to test it on a few different systems.

There are a number of things to think about:

CPU speed - how long will the game logic itself take to perform including collision detection and commands which dynamically alter a meshes structure (vertexcoords etc) CPU Speed can also impact whether you can afford to have music in your game as well as the quality of the sound effects.

Video card - how many polygons do you wish to have in your scenes, how much texture memory do you wish to use, what screen resolution do you wish to use. Also, a good CPU can offset the poor framerate of a slow or older video card. You also need to consider if you want your game to run on machines with an onboard graphics card. On some older onboard graphics cards I've found that lightmapped levels can often appear untextured.

Despite having heard that animation of md2 and b3d models is supposedly equally efficient I have found in a game I am working on that I can have twice as many 500 polygon md2 models animating as equivalent b3d models on screen at once. Although b3d is in most ways a better format (ie read all bar the fact that I can have twice as many of the md2s on screen at once) it is suitable for some games.


Ross C(Posted 2005) [#5]
.b3d models that are animated, are slower then an md2 counterpart, because the transforming the bones do to the vertices is done by software. So, md2 will always be much faster as you simply displaying a new mesh basically.