Oh pshhh credit where credit is due
UPDATE :
I've setup my hackintosh again - ElCapitan has proven to be a nightmare to get working with my graphics card - in the end I had to create a custom NVCAP (a series of hex values that is queried at a low level to determine what outputs are available on a card and the priority of those outputs for use as the primary display) but now it's working. I've also setup a Mavericks install on another drive - worked instantly - go figure.
Anyway - the important point is that previous support was coded on Mountain Lion back when the maximum supported GL version was 3.2 and very buggy support at that!
Since Mavericks, OSX has supported GL4.1 (a rather laughable performance from Apple given they're still no further and they've JUST released the brand new 'Sierra') which means with the occasional alternate render-path, all engine functionality (heavy use of tessellation for Terrain rendering and my currently in development planet rendering) is working on OSX
I don't have ATI hardware except in a laptop and I'm not getting OSX running on an AMD chip any time soon so if anybody out there is running OSX with ATI hardware and would provide testing - I'd appriciate it!
Linux support is just fine with official Nvidia drivers for Linux as well as Mesa - not tried ATI or Intel cards on that platform however but can't see it being a problem - maybe some GLSL bugs that the more forgiving Nvidia drivers have allowed me to miss.
IOS and Android support are a complete mess - not really interested in spending a week or two researching the latest IOS hoops to jump through in order to support Iphones etc and I've only got GLES 2.0 support on my available android device which isn't all that great - but I've got some basic stuff compiled and running on Android 4.4 and 6.0.
For now I'm dropping IOS and Android support but will maintain the basics so it can be spun up at a later date.
Finally I've looked into Vulkan support and it's well within my grasp - unfortunately Nvidia have refused to support Fermi chips! so no way to test - lets hope ATI have been kinder and supported the chip in my laptop
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All in all it's looking good - I've closed off all current bugs and I'm well on the way to having the planet renderer up and running - so many different techniques to experiment with!
I've massively improved the portal rendering - I'm using it to cheat rendering through windows and the such on my spaceship - from inside or outside - Basically rather than spend aaaaages creating an interior and exterior design and a performance sapping culling mechanism to support the sparse layout - I'm just using a BSP scheme for the ship internals, roughly matching the shape of a ship model in the space renderer - then I slap a portal in the BSP level and one on the exterior ship and BOOM - I avoid tons of work both performance wise and 3D modelling wise - so what if the inside is actually bigger than the outside? unless you've got a tape measure you can't tell - so I simply won't add one
To test this I'm currently flying Quake1 deathmatch level 2 (the greatest map of all time) across a terrain while on the outside it's a cube - Dr Who eat your heart out.
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Developing my game by using the Engine and tools as designed is helping to refine both for the task - really looking forward to releasing some stuff so I can finally get some feedback and hopefully see it used!
Stay frosty.
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