Running Bopimo on non-Vulkan hardware

Dec 13, 2024

In Bopimo's current state, the renderer it supports to render the game is Vulkan. As it has been found out, a lot of players have older hardware that isn't recent enough to run Vulkan. Luckily enough, there's a workaround that will force the game to run in OpenGL mode until the game is properly updated to address this issue in the future.

The game renders blocks like this due to Bopimo's current usage of Instance Shader Paremeters. The buffer for these in the OpenGL renderer is really small, so it bugs out when trying to render a lot of blocks. The planned system for update 1.1.0 will fix this.

Automatic fallback

In 1.0.1 I've enabled Godot's automatic fallback to OpenGL project setting. This should ensure that if your computer doesn't support Vulkan, it will at least start the game properly without crashing.

override.cfg

If the game doesn't automatically fall back to OpenGL, Godot allows you to override project settings with a file called "override.cfg". This file needs to be placed in the same directory as the Bopimo client executable. On Windows computers, the client executable is located at

C:\Users\YOUR USER\AppData\Roaming\Bopimo!\Client
Alternatively, you can put the following in the windows path bar

%appdata%/Bopimo!/Client

From here, you need to make a text file called exactly "override.cfg". The content in this file should be the following 2 lines:

[rendering] renderer/rendering_method="gl_compatibility"

This will force the game to run in OpenGL mode.

The Future

In 1.1.0, Bopimo is going to be ditching Vulkan rendering altogether and switch to using OpenGL. This will make the game look the same as it does in the current Vulkan version, but will allow players with older hardware to play and view the game correctly. To make this change, a lot of work has to be done with how the game renders the visuals of blocks. I also plan on optimizing rendering significantly, using Godot's features such as MultiMesh, which allows me to render all blocks of the same type in a singular draw call.

I'm not sure of an estimated time for this update, but it's going to be the next major update. It may take some time, as I have to rewrite the visual code for all blocks in the game. But I'm making all of this rendering stuff a priority, as I want users with lower end computers to be able to run the game as soon as possible.

FireCat