RMQ Engine ... Sheesh!

[goldenboy]

Stalker has a DircetX 8 renderer. All 3 games in the series have it, the last one dates from 2009.

For good reason. Their market is largely in eastern Europe.

Mount & Blade (2008-present) has a DirectX 7 (!!) renderer for people who need that.

Again for good reason. The Mount&Blade collection I saw in a shop yesterday is 35 euros. That is a lot of money. By lowering the system requirements, more people buy the game, giving Taleworlds money that Taleworlds would otherwise not get.

If I made an indie game, I sure as heck wouldn't make it require DirectX 11. I would have to be stupid.

[mh]

Yeah, but like I said earlier, it doesn't even have to go all the way to 11.

Even at the 7/8/9 levels there is functionality that can be exploited for better performance/quality but which is completely missed by aiming too low.

This isn't an either/or between pushing hardware requirements to the point of silliness versus keeping the crappy old GL1.0 support (which is it's own point of silliness but in the opposite direction) - that's very binary thinking. It's about finding a reasonable middle ground that's sensible to work with, gives better productivity and lets you just get stuff done.

It's easy to forget that the Stalker/etc guys are fully geared-up game studios with dedicated teams. The kind of level we work at it's more typically one person trying to juggle conflicting demands, so something has to give way.