Board Thread:Game Discussion/@comment-29799506-20170920140450/@comment-26829117-20170920163649

The problem is not the hardware. I've written three dimensional engines over the years and I've never written for specific hardware. The problem is that Apple keep insisting on using a closed eco-system rather than an open one, forcing developers to either use an abstraction layer or have two development efforts.

A few years ago you could write an engine using openGL which is supported on both iOS and Android. Then Apple introduced Metal, ostensibly to take advantage of enhanced graphic capabilities in GPUs. Something that has never been an issue for openGL to support in the past.

I suspect RR3 is written using OpenGL because of it's age and the fact it works on both Android and Apple but I don't know. There are plenty of examples of weather effect, even particle weather, for openGL.

RR3 already has the ability to downgrade the experience for older devices. I don't think the issue is about stopping supporting older devices.

You get weather effects on PSP (I'm taking this as fact as I've never owned a PSP) because someone wrote them for it. It uses a basic code library based on OpenGL. This is not about GPU processing power as the PSP was released in 2004 and discontinued in 2014. The iPhone was still 3 years away from launch when the PSP was launched.

If you want a real challenge then look at cloth animation (something RR3 should never need to worry about). That's a really difficult real time animation problem. I tried to get a system to work many times and failed.