So having finished Slave: Unchained (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/slave-unchained) last weekend I quickly realised it insta crashed on most peoples systems.

First off why? Well turns out I'm a noob at GPU programming and (I'm assuming) I was using features that were not supported on older cards.

I was doing something stupid for my tile maps. I was storing all the texture atlas lookups in a big shader uniforms. Older cards have limitiations to how big these uniforms can be!

So I had to change the entire tilemap implementation. A bug that cauess you to restructure your entire backend? Those the best.

In the end I opted for using a texture as a lookup. The issue there is that openGL is pretty obtuse. I had to make sure that I understood properly what happens to texel values when it's offloaded to the GPU, and the kind of data I was sending was correct.

After wrangling that, I had additional problems. To not get too bogged down, turns out incorrectly using "flat" in shaders creates some odd behaviour in older cards but not in newer ones. Not fun.

This soon went from an afternoon fix to a substantial week long rewrite. Does that follow in the spirit of ludum dare? I dunno. I mean the game is pretty much exactly the same. It's just the behind the scenes, most of it changed.

All in all. Idk. Is it fixed on all cards? Who knows. Do I want to give up forever? Most probably :)