Thank you for the well researched information about Shader Models 2 and 3. Interesting to read some facts, rather than opinions.

Quote from hackerx :

Well, seems your original LFS is better then than my copy. Thought maybe it's a translation thing then, but no, my copy does same when set to english (enter value out of range to 3D settings - LFS disappears).

You could perhaps ask Eric to try it on his copy?

Sorry I should have posted, I've fixed it now.

When I first tested entering the out of range value, it was on the options screen (after going through the dialog) and there was no crash. The crash only happens when entering an out of bound value into the slider in that dialog.

I've fixed that and the text mip bias thing.

Quote from Scawen :

from big developers pressurised by sinister capitalist forces into requiring the latest graphics cards that supported SM3.

Selling and consuming is business. If it doesn't look fresh, cool, innovating it doesn't sell. 9.0c got introduced with the release of the Xbox 360, that was the main reason I think.

Anyway, yes it took some months to implement on the newest cards at that time and even more time before people start buying it but declaring somebody capitalist now for owning a SM3.0 capable graphics card is quite funny. Like Troy said, those cards are on the market now for less then a LFS license. And what is the cost of that? Almost nothing hm

Quote from cargame.nl :

...but declaring somebody capitalist now for owning a SM3.0 capable graphics card is quite funny.

OK, as usual you are just trying to annoy me. This time, you are inventing things and attributing them to me, when I never said anything of the sort.

I am sick of arguing here with dimwits who are angry with me for not excluding XP and Linux from our user base. This has gone on for months. It's some kind of freakish capitalism thing.

Like... because YOU bought Windows 8, you gradually become angry that anyone develops software that runs on an earlier version of Windows. Ridiculous. When you buy Windows, you don't become a shareholder. You don't have anything to gain from becoming a Microsoft Windows salesman.

By the way, the word "YOU" here doesn't refer to cargame.nl in particular, just everyone who believes that it is a fantastic idea to remove a large portion on our users, because "you have to move with the times" and stupid, capitalist crap like that. I hate that stuff, got it?

Well, I have to move with times because my GPU has burned out and the integrated one supports only DirectX 9.0a(text in LFS is messed up since 0.F update) and SM2. . New PC will come in 4 days, YAY!

But at the end it is all up to you what to support and what not. Maybe gathering info about users hardware via LFS would be useful for you to decide. And if you see that last users with SM2 cards have upgraded, then you could move on with calm mind and thought that none of your customers was screwed.

Anyway, at least the period when you had to buy new PC every 4 years to keep up is over.

I'll try to cover the then called ATI side of old common cards that might still be in use, with only 2.0 shader support.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_8000_Series (1.4)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_9000_Series (2.0)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_X800_Series (2.0b)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_X1000_Series (3.0)
(quick relevant info in the top right box with handy links to preceding and succeeding card series)

And some more condensed info from unofficial source:
http://forums.na.leagueoflegen ... d/showthread.php?t=143647

I did own a card from 1.4 line and some years later 3.0. The thing is the 1.4 still works, and i played LFS on it up until 5 years ago . It was a GREAT commonly used card, with excellent cost/performance, but I ran win98 on that PC - card is Radeon 8500. In terms of performance I could run first Far Cry and Morrowind on that. I am not sure if I could run win XP though and the card only had 64 MB of VRAM. Probably safe to assume the 1.4 line no one with gaming in mind uses today, maybe only as an emulator machine with the card being so endurable.

I haven't owned a card from the 2.0 lines but I remember in those times new released cards having extremely high cost/performance ratio (high cost, average performance), which only financially backed enthusiasts would be willing to afford right after release. Only after the next series would be released the price of the previous one would drop considerably, becoming affordable to wider rage of people. That means the release date of the last series to support 2.0 (2004-2005 for the X800) could be more accurately represented by adding a year or two (and more if you consider the classifieds).
Looks impossible to estimate the number of LFS players using the 2.0 line but they undoubtedly exist if the 2.0 durability is anything like 1.4.

You could try and gather card usage info by including the card from the unofficial link in some kind of poll and try to estimate by the number of hits and time it took. More precise possibility would be to release a temporary 3.0 official test patch via the auto-updater and examine the number of complaints of LFS not working in the first day or more. This test patch would include only the 3.0 change if possible to minimize false errors. Preceding that would be some kind of announcement so at least some people would have an idea what to expect. And have a revertible patch ready in case the 3.0 doesn't satisfy! But you know how people can be... you give them something, then take it away and... yes .

Tough shoes to be in. Decision seems easy if no one uses 2.0 in LFS. But that would we gain with 3.0 at this point? More FPS because of increased efficiency? Is it worth the risk of breaking the game for some people? Would it not be better to wait until 3.0 features come to LFS to put them in? I don't know, just asking rhetorical questions

Is anyone familiar with how did World of Warcraft gathered user card info and made the transition? I reckon they started with 2.0 model and are now on newer verion.

Thank you for the good information.

The last two posts make me think there are still a lot of people out there (a minority, yes) with an older card, running LFS and other software very nicely, although their card can only run up to Shader Model 2.

It seems probably best to (at least for testing purposes) add a Misc option to select SM2 or SM3 as some people suggested. Leave SM2 as the default setting. Then continue to develop LFS default shaders in SM2 language. Gradually I may learn about the limitations, and gather more information about which users can use SM2 / SM3. This way, people with really modern cards can use SM3 if that actually gives better performance on their system, and people can have fun making high end shaders that need SM3 instructions.

One question to anyone who knows: Do all SM2 shaders compile without complication in SM3 mode? LFS default ones do but they are simple...

As far i know there's no problems.
You can do shader fallback according to user's gpu anyway.

Quote from Scawen :

One question to anyone who knows: Do all SM2 shaders compile without complication in SM3 mode? LFS default ones do but they are simple...

From what I can tell there shouldn't be any issue with that.

Quote from Scawen :

By the way, the word "YOU" here doesn't refer to cargame.nl in particular,

Nono, I don't feel addressed... Can't be because I actually never saw Windows 8 functioning/operating in real life haha. But this;

Quote from Scawen :

Obviously the usual capitalists around here will be telling me I should support the latest and greatest,

Gave me the impression that everybody which owns a SM3.0 or up GPU was considered a capitalist now and the only thing I wanted to explain that you don't have to be rich and famous to possess a SM3.0 capable GPU or up. I find it very hard to believe that there are still hundreds of people with SM2.0 technology around, let alone thousands. No reason to get angry, it's just an opinion.

And isn't it actually very exciting to do a very small investment in something if you get a much better experience? I now have anaglyph glasses just because of LFS! Only thing I need to figure out it is why the car side window looks so weird / double colored.

edit...

Quote from pasibrzuch :

It's easier to get used (feels like eyes need to be crossed in red-cyan mode too),

Thats it! It looks better when I try forcing myself to cross eye.. Problem is I can't race like that

My oar:

I have an old PC - 7 years old + change. My GPU wasn't high-end even when I bought it, and the PC as a whole can only sort-of cope with open layouts right now. But the GPU is an SM3 model (Radeon X1650 XT). So I personally look forward to trying an SM3 test version

Yes, there are bound to be people running LFS on SM2 cards. We don't know how many but it'll be non-zero (and I agree with the often-made suggestion that LFS should phone home so you know how many OS/CPU/GPU combos are out there, Scawen).
How many is too many to move LFS on to SM3? (I have no particular view on this.) Supporting both is great if it doesn't suck much dev time...

It might help if someone with an SM2 card could pipe up and say "hey my PC is still usable for LFS", cos it would convince me that such a person exists. At present I doubt it.
Edit: on reflection, I realise this bit is just wrong. My bad. Bound to be a handful of people with quicker CPUs than me and yet with SM2 cards...

http://wiki.winehq.org/DirectX-Shaders

According to this page we can guess that shader model 3 might not be supported fully in wine (as of 2013-06-02 atleast), so having backwards compatibility SM2 is a nice thing.

Not quite, the content of that page hasn't been updated since May 2008.

Infact I get slightly lower FPS while using Pixel Shader 3.0



I don't really see a problem that it stays at 2.0, even though 100% of LFS users have atleast Pixel Shader 4.0 graphic card according to lfsbench

Quote from Racer X NZ :

8(.1) causes issues. (16 bit data bases don't run under 8 64 bit...

16bit programs won't run under 64bit windows, even XP/2003 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896458
This used to be a fairly common problem, where the software itself was 32bit, but had an old, 16bit installer. The software itself would run fine, you just couldn't install it.

---

One potentially relevant thing I noticed while researching SM2 v SM3, is that it was rare for SM2 cards to have more than 256MB RAM, and often only 128MB. This probably isn't much of a problem currently, but if the new Westhill is using more/higher res textures then it might become an issue. I don't know the specific numbers of cards still in use, but based on what was available >256MB didn't really become common until SM3.

Also to echo someone else here - provided you have a PCIe capable motherboard (again, circa 2004; seems to have been a big shift in all types of hardware around then) you can pick up a new 1GB GPU for £20 that'll monster any DX9c era card (it'll even run Crysis at medium-high).

---

Regarding the shader issue in Linux, I had already installed D3DX9_43 (d3dcompiler_43.dll, d3dx9_43.dll) using winetricks, as someone had suggested in the 0.6F threads.
However, there is an option for: "directx9 - MS DirectX 9 (Usually overkill. Try d3dx9_36 first)". I haven't tried installing the full DirectX9 yet or a newer Wine version - I'll try to test over the weekend if I get chance.

Scawen, a lot of people have contacted me lately that they cannot connect my insim to LFS, after a further investigation I have concluded its the issue with LFS and not my program.
Problem is that when enter /insim 29999 in LFS, you simply get message that port has failed to bind. I have checked firewall settings, and port wasn't in use as I checked with tcpview.
It has bothered me a lot whats the actual issue. After a lot of playing with settings I have noticed that Server IP setting in Start New Host affect /insim.
On my computer when its default value of "auto" it works with no problems, if I enter there my real local IP it will bind port successfully but for some reason insim won't be able to connect (or I should use the same IP in my program), and finally when you enter a wrong IP in Start New Host it will always fail to bind.

Possible solutions are to always use "auto" for insim or perhaps add IP and admin password to Options (SHIFT+O) as obviously it affect a lot more than just creating a new in-game server.

Hmm, in fact there is almost never any need to manually set the IP address, but I guess that isn't clear to people.

Yes, that would be my question. Do all these people have multiple IP addresses on a single computer and they are running a server on it? As far as I know, that is the only reason to bind to a specific IP address.

And when this reason is relevant, it is also relevant to InSim.

Quote from cargame.nl :

Thats it! It looks better when I try forcing myself to cross eye.. Problem is I can't race like that

Tested this a bit more. I came to the conclusion that I had to manually change the output of RGB channels @Nvidea control panel. (Realized this because Youtube movies looked 'wrong' also)

I upped the Gamma output of red a bit as a result it works much better.

It's a really nice experience now to sit really close (1 meter) from a projector screen. Two things I noticed, the horizontal screen width cannot be bigger then 8000 mm ( 80 cm). Not sure if it's very important because I needed to use a much smaller number on a normal computer monitor also for some reason.

And the other thing, dashboards sadly look very very 2D from close by. Actually the XFR had the best dashboard for this 3D experience. I think because it's mostly digital and fills up all the dashboard space behind the virtual wheel.

Quote from cargame.nl :

Two things I noticed, the horizontal screen width cannot be bigger then 8000 mm ( 80 cm).

Uh, 8000 mm is 8 metres...

Quote from PeterN :

Hmm, in fact there is almost never any need to manually set the IP address, but I guess that isn't clear to people.

For me i "need" because:

I run a server for a beta insim on a laptop i use as vps (joining in local)
Running a server on this computer (127.0.0.1)

But it could be nice a list of local server if it's possible of course

I think they are talking about the "IP Address" field on the 6th line down on the "Start New Host" screen or the /ip command for the dedicated host.

That is not the "Host IP address" on the "Join Specific Host" screen.

Very few people should need to use the first one. Most people who are using it should probably delete it and everything will be fine.

Quote from Scawen :

Yes, that would be my question. Do all these people have multiple IP addresses on a single computer and they are running a server on it? As far as I know, that is the only reason to bind to a specific IP address.

And when this reason is relevant, it is also relevant to InSim.

As they couldn't bind port that suggests IP did not match local IP. In that case even server would not work. Maybe it was leftover from other network or simply they played with settings entering nonsense values? Not sure, but none of them seem to be network expert (no offence)

Quote from PeterN :

Uh, 8000 mm is 8 metres...

on the other side it cannot be lower than 20 cm, what if I like to play LFS on my phone ?

Quote from PeterN :

Uh, 8000 mm is 8 metres...

OK.. I'm done with this.

[Starts Wii, Mario Kart]

Just a Cent for shader model Version: Make a poll!

Regarding to test patch: FPS raised in Multiplayer replay with full grid and a lot of chaos in t1
Cross eyed view: YAY, finally a 3D mode for People like me with cross eyed normal view!

Just a small request for handicapped people: I have a Problem with my ears too... i can just hear 20% on the left and 80% on the right... is it possible to get a slider to adjust the Sound Balance?

BTW: The one, who tell me how to turn off spell check in IE gets a Cookie!
(Not here, PM please)

Quote from Trekkerfahrer :

Just a small request for handicapped people: I have a Problem with my ears too... i can just hear 20% on the left and 80% on the right... is it possible to get a slider to adjust the Sound Balance?

Your sound card doesn't let you do it via the mixer??
(Oh hang on - I seem to recall they hid the balance options stupidly deeply starting on Win7, but it's still there... Somewhere under advanced properties or something insane.)