POLL: Canvas and Shader Support

[Helvecta]

I really would like to settle once and for all if I should use canvases and shaders. They're nice features, but they may exclude users, as the wiki warns, so I would like to use the L2D community to try and get an idea of what percentage of users would be excluded.

Please answer the poll with which ones (if any) you are able to use. If you do not know which can be used, run the attached .love!

Thanks, everyone!

[slime]

The next major version of LÖVE will be upping its system requirements so that shaders and canvases are required (which means support for them will be guaranteed.)

OpenGL ES 2 (supported by at least 99.9% of Android and 100% of iOS devices) is used by the mobile implementations of LÖVE, and it mandates support for both those features as well.

On the desktop, the only systems that won't support shaders and canvases are very old integrated Intel GPUs in Windows (some do have support in OS X and Linux, with the right drivers.)

The first nvidia and ATI/AMD graphics cards to support those features were released in ~2004.

97.7% of computers which run standalone Unity3d games have the necessary requirements ("DX9 (3.0)" or better, on the Shader Generations graph.)

[Helvecta]

Thanks for the post, the research you've relayed gives me high hopes!

By "major release", do you mean version 0.1? Do you have a ballpark time frame of when the version will be released (within the next 2 years)?

[slime]

By "major release", do you mean version 0.1?

"0.10", "1.0", "One Billion", whatever it ends up being called. The next release which isn't 0.9.x.

Do you have a ballpark time frame of when the version will be released (within the next 2 years)?

I definitely hope it won't take as long as 2 years, but I can't give any specific dates because I don't know.

[substitute541]

I currently don't have support for both shaders and canvases...

Hopefully by the next few weeks I would get my graphics card back now. At the moment I'm using Intel GMA 3000 (the base system was bought about 5-6 years ago, so yeah.)

[slime]

I believe the more recent drivers for the GMA 3000 on Windows do support Canvases, at least.

[Helvecta]

Thanks to everyone for responding to the poll, I really appreciate it! Seems like a little over 10% of people cannot use the two, that's good to know.

I'll leave the poll open because why not

[Jasoco]

I voted. So now it's exactly 90% in favor.