Horde3D

No, but it may create a confusion if my own code is based on this standard. This was mostly a remark.

About hardware, I will have acces to a radeon 7500 card in some time but this is not certain. If it should be materialized, I will give a try with Horde' samples. But I would like to get confirmation of what I read.

I just read Horde is shader based and require hardware with shaders 2.0 as a minimum. Firstly, is this true? As I didn't find it on the website. Secondly, is there any thoughts to target older hardware? This would be certainly with unavailable effects such as normal mapping, but could makes Horde able to display polygons and animated characters on modest configurations.

Check the requirements section on the features page. Horde is heavily based on shaders and mordern GPU features, so it makes no sense to create a fallback renderer.

Fundamentally though, it pushes polygons to the screen and applies textures and effects to them - which can be done on any 3D-capable hardware. I don't propose that the main development branch expend any effort on a fallback renderer, but I think it would be nice to build one at some point - we are cutting ourselves out of a very large part of the market otherwise

I think the main "selling point" of Horde is that you *can* do some great (commercial quality) graphics quite easily. This power comes mainly from support for advanced shaders and the possbility to do some fancy post processing effects and realize different renderer designs with the pipeline scripts. Having a truly next-gen game that also works on low end hardware (less than GL 2.0) certainly won't work.

Ogre's material class encapsulates ALL aspects of the visual appearance,
of an object. It also includes other flags which
might not be traditionally thought of as material properties such as
culling modes and depth buffer settings, but these affect the
appearance of the rendered object and are convenient to attach to the
material since it keeps all the settings in one place. This is
different to Direct3D which treats a material as just the colour
components (diffuse, specular) and not texture maps etc. An Ogre
Material can be thought of as equivalent to a 'Shader'.
@par
A Material can be rendered in multiple different ways depending on the
hardware available. You may configure a Material to use high-complexity
fragment shaders, but these won't work on every card; therefore a Technique
is an approach to creating the visual effect you are looking for. You are advised
to create fallback techniques with lower hardware requirements if you decide to
use advanced features. In addition, you also might want lower-detail techniques
for distant geometry.
@par
Each technique can be made up of multiple passes. A fixed-function pass
may combine multiple texture layers using multitexrtuing, but Ogre can
break that into multiple passes automatically if the active card cannot
handle that many simultaneous textures. Programmable passes, however, cannot
be split down automatically, so if the active graphics card cannot handle the
technique which contains these passes, OGRE will try to find another technique
which the card can do. If, at the end of the day, the card cannot handle any of the
techniques which are listed for the material, the engine will render the
geometry plain white, which should alert you to the problem.
@par
Ogre comes configured with a number of default settings for a newly
created material. These can be changed if you wish by retrieving the
default material settings through
SceneManager::getDefaultMaterialSettings. Any changes you make to the
Material returned from this method will apply to any materials created
from this point onward.