Here is a show-stopper issue for older hardware:
- Starting a game crashes with default settings on Thinkpad R60 (can not compile star shader)
- Game no longer crashes when disabling shaders (e.g. by manually editing the Luanti config file)
- Settings dialog tells me that not using shaders is not recommended, offers to enable them
- If I do the recommended thing and enable the shaders, the game crashes again
I get 30fps in Mineclonia, so this laptop is perfectly able to run Luanti, as far as I can tell.
Edit:
Depending on how capable the users hardware is, shader-related crashes can happen
either when joining a world (making it possible to disable shaders in the GUI if the user can figure the reason out) or when the application starts. It should be possible to reproduce the latter with this invocation (but maybe not? I do not know):
LANG=C MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=1.4 MESA_EXTENSION_MAX_YEAR=2002 ./bin/luanti
Edit (2):
If the game crashes at startup, this is the (sanitized) error message:
Code: Select all
2024-10-31 22:32:30: ERROR[Main]: An unhandled exception occurred: "Shaders are enabled but GLSL is not supported by the driver."
2024-10-31 22:32:30: ERROR[Main]: In thread b64a9900:
2024-10-31 22:32:30: ERROR[Main]: $FOO/src/main.cpp:275: int main(int, char**): A fatal error occurred: "Shaders are enabled but GLSL is not supported by the driver."
Edit (3):
The 3D clouds in the main menu no longer show up on older hardware. I first thought that it was a stylistic choice, but it seems to be a regression.
Edit (4):
The enter-the-world-and-the-game-crashes issue seems to have been a red herring – something was messing up the shader directory when updating from an older version via git. Thanks to luatic for helping me to debug this.
The start-the-game-and-it-crashes issue seems to be a real thing though. Older hardware that can run the game perfectly fine (unless I am mistaken somehow?) is no longer able to see the menu when shaders are turned on, which seems to be the default.
Edit (5):
Discussing this on IRC I learned that I apparently have “garbage hardware” and why the game can crash at startup.
<sfan5> reading the RC forum post, I strongly advise we dont care about whatever garbage hardware the Thinkpad R60 has
<sfan5> main menu clouds require shaders so the menu will crash if they dont work unless you edit minetest.conf and disable shaders
IMO, menu clouds requiring a gaming GPU seems not necessary, an they worked fine without it for many years and the game seems to run perfectly fine on my “garbage hardware”.
Edit (6):
sfan5 already knew about the shader clouds main menu issue since 2024-10-13:
<sfan5> something I just noticed is that since clouds now use shaders and we have clouds in the main menu that means Minetest will just not launch if you don't have shader support
<sfan5> this should affect approximately nobody and can be fixed by adding 'enable_shaders = false' to minetest.conf
<sfan5> IMO we should just keep it like this and see if anyone ever complains
Well, I am complaining … I disagree about the solution though. It is IMO unreasonable to require better hardware support for the main menu than for the rest of the game. It is not like the clouds are hard to render.
I am erle. I am non-binary. Please address me in gender-neutral terms.
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