vid_renderer

[Apeirogon]

Why not just make a simple titlemap, where acs or something write on screen "this mod designed to use with "render name" rendering. Go to "options-more options-even more options" and change renderer to "render name" "?

[gwHero]

Why not just make a simple titlemap, where acs or something write on screen "this mod designed to use with "render name" rendering. Go to "options-more options-even more options" and change renderer to "render name" "?

In fact I have this actually, except with the addition that it also checks if the correct renderer is active. But, as some correctly stated, it's actually not the chosen renderer where I am interested in, but the features that are or are not supported by the chosen renderer.

[_mental_]

If you are so inclined to emphasize recommended settings (renderer, dynamic lights, whatever) then add skippable text screen with list of them to the first map. No need to detect the current settings, just notify player about important options.

[Nash]

What we could really use here is a new feature: a set of MAPINFO flags that declare "I require feature 'x'", e.g. sloped 3D Floors or Truecolor, and have the engine output a warning if a user starts up the map with a renderer that doesn't support one of the declared features. This doesn't expose anything to ZScript, and since it's detecting the feature, not the renderer, it's future-proof -- e.g. if the Carmack renderer magically gets sloped 3D floors, it's marked as supported internally and the warning goes away for maps that declare it.

This sounds like the best solution to me

[gwHero]

If you are so inclined to emphasize recommended settings (renderer, dynamic lights, whatever) then add skippable text screen with list of them to the first map. No need to detect the current settings, just notify player about important options.

Well actually it's not a big deal; I just thought when someone plays the game with wrong settings, it would be nice to have a warning issued like "hey! you're using the wrong settings to display this game correctly" because my TC really has a lot of glitches when the wrong renderer is chosen. If I had known that it's absolutely not done to use the vid_renderer cvar for this, I would not even have asked for it's successor.
I think Xaser has nailed (the small) problem here very well.

[Rachael]

Well, by default, every mapset except the most classic ones require the OpenGL renderer - which supports nearly everything, except the COLORMAP lump (I think there was plans to write that in, at some point) and sprite pixels being drawn below the floor. Once those two make it in, you really don't even need the software renderer for anything, except for maps that take advantage of massive rendering hacks that the hardware renderer can't reproduce.