Well atm I'd say you need to target a machine with least a
GeforceFX5200, 1200MHZ+ cpu and 512meg dual-channel ram but I'm still choosing parts so I can't tell you exactly yet, I'm going by price vs performance because I want people to be able to afford the bits and pieces, though of course it is temping to build a state of the art system... I also want the same parts to be available in 3 months time so the thing can actually be built, you know the rate of progress in this field is very, very quick, and products are dropped all the time.
The case design I'm working on is limited by the size of the parts it contains, and also price. The spacecube is certainly cool, and I'd like one but I think the main problem is the micro atx mobo's really don't cut it in the ways I want. I'll post a render next week sometime, it's really not that important right now (Don't worry it doesn't look like a vcr
)
I wouldn't worry too much about implementing shaders at the moment, but I would look into understanding them, so that when the time comes
you can add them to your project, remember this will take quite some time before plans are finalized and production of kits etc begins, so you have time to come to grips with all that. Put it this way, my copy of DBpro hasn't even arrived yet so I'm stuck with the demo, and My eye candy demo involves dynamic cloth simulation and such and needs patch 4.1 at least to work according to Lee. So You can allow for the future whilst working in the present with what you've got, do however read about shaders and their capabilities, so you can factor that in to your development schedule. The quality of games I'm thinking about will need at least 3 months of development for a really talented team, and possibly years to make top quality rpg's etc, so that gives anyone who wants to work on games for the machine quite a lot of time
[edit]
Just saw raven's post:
I was thinking also that DBpro may be able to use cg/hlsl shaders in a future patch so putting off learning low level shader languages might not be too bad a thing for most folks, better for now to focus on gameplay and originality, add the bells and whistles down the line once you have hardware capable of handling the various shaders, the software emulator is so slow it's painful
ZX Spectrum 48k Issue 3, Radio shack Tape drive, Rank arena 12" T.V. set.
