I beheld the changelog jME 3.1 beta and I was very sad to see that OpenGL 1 will be removed. My PC does not support OpenGL 2, I have done everything to upgrade but the only way is to buy a newer, but I can not do it for personal reasons. The Changelog said that “OpenGL first few people still only have it” but it is wrong, almost every computer I’ve ever used has only OpenGL 1, and search Google “Problem with GLSL 2” will appear videos to lots of people with problems play games because it does not support OpenGL 1. Even if I had OpenGL 2 on my PC still use jME 3.0, because I’m making games for all to access.
a) Nearly any GPU sold after 2004 has openGL 2 or more
b) GLSL != openGL. The openGL 4.X uses GLSL 1.5 mainly. The SL is only the Shader Language.
Also it’s like that: Supporting legacy shaders is quite some effort. The newer openGL Version the better/cooler things you can do with it (and more easily and more performant) so it’s pointless to stick with a very old version.
Especially because someone interested in playing games and sill only having an openGL 1 card, well, might be better of playing some terminal-games
Well, yes, especially since OpenGL 1 didn’t have shaders. Basically that’s the ultimate point. Supporting the old OpenGL 1 fixed function pipeline was taking more and more effort as the shaders evolved. Dropping it let us clean up a lot of ugly stuff.
@Dimalenus
You still have SDK 3.0 which is more than capable, it will be available for download after 3.1 is stable, so i see no loss here…
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I agree with him that there is some kind of small loss…
We should try to prevent incompatibility with 3.0 if we can.
Its possible to enable it in 3.1 somehow ? Maybe changing the core code and recompiling ?
@Dimalenus , can you test 3.1 in your computer and tell us what happens ?
Well…it’s easier said than done guys…
It would be me we’d have even dropped opengl 2 compat…
That’s already pretty annoying maintaining different versions of shaders from glsl 1.1 to 1.5 (btw I think they aligned glsl and opengl versions since opengl 4).
Also fixed pipeline didn’t allow half of the things we use in shaders…
I was thinking about this and maybe OP has made an mistake here and there is no problem at all, lets wait @Dimalenus to test the current 3.1 version in his machine to know if it will work, I think it will, since we are just talking about incompatibility with shadders and not OpenGl version itself… Right ?
This
Will be a great mistake to miss the first OpenGL compatibility, I would not use jME 3.1 he did not even bear my PC, since I want to make games that everyone has access
OpenGL 2.0 low end hardware should be something like nVidia FX 5xxx series card. Thats about 10 years(or more) span…thats more than one could possibly be happy to have, as it offers massive, huge potential user base…on the top of that, you still have SDK 3.0 which is very stable and works well, and offers even wider span, so i just don’t understand what sort of loss you pointing at…i truly do not understand concern here…
jME 3.1 will come with many improvements and when I say many are often the same, moreover jMonkeyEngine will not stop its development so early and is so boring I have to stop in jME 3.0, just because of a lost compatibility with “old” computers.
Isn’t possible to install opengl on old computers even if it has very old hardware ?
I have an impression I made an very old computer running win 98 to run opengl 2.0 a long time ago…
Most advantages of 3.1 wouldn’t be available for OpenGL 1 anyway, even if we were to support it. So using 3.0 or 3.1 under OpenGL1 would be virtually the same. If your hardware doesn’t get out of the 90s then your games won’t either.
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OpenGL 1 should die in flames - I lost so much time to it early in my life :chimpanzee_tongue:
Also please note that you are currently evaluating the PLATFORM over which build your new game.
Therefore… unless you have a crazy-fast time to market, your game won’t be available for several months at least. As time passes, legacy hardware becomes naturally less and less a problem.
Do you care about supporting, for example, the commodore64?
No. Opengl 1.0 support has been dropped in JME 3.1
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Hey how did you manage to plug in a monitor, keyboard and mouse to a toaster?
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My computer is not that old, he only has three years of purchase, what is old is the video card. But back to the subject, @normen some people say “Working with OpenGL 1 is limited” are very wrong, in my games I always try to get the most out of the advanced graphics capabilities, while maintaining support on older. As? Here’s an example: I use if that checks if your computer supports GLSL 2, if true start advanced shadows else start simple shadows. 
I really wanted to you to keep support for OpenGL 1.
So working with OpenGL1 isn’t limited when you don’t use OpenGL1… You make less and less sense…