[General] Compability: Is there a way to make your map well playable in both SD and HD graphics?

[Barbafire]

Hello everyone here at Hive! I'd like some opinions, both about Design, and User Experience.

A player, yesterday, said that he was playing my project on HD graphics by mistake, and said that the game dropped to 5 FPS on a boss fight. My potato PC was not lagging that way, so, I went to see the replay. Besides the lag due to HD graphics, I've noticed that some things converted to HD graphics were not properly right, as I've setup in the editor. My project is all based on SD graphics, because I knew since the beginning, that SD maps can be easily played in HD, different from the opposite. Some issues I've noticed:

• Some models size are completely different. Dragons got different sizes, while on SD they are all the same (same scaling value, and same size); Also, some bosses or got a huge bonus on their sizes, making them Colossals beings, or greatly decreasing their size, making them almost the same size as a normal unit;
• Game much heavier than normal; Great magics were often causing big lag spikes;
• Due to some model changes, some things were missplaced on the terrain;

So, my question is: Is there a proper way to make the game 100% compatible with both versions, or the best choice is to set the project to be playable only with SD graphics?

It could be good to let players choose which graphics they want to play, but for now, HD graphics are affecting the overhall experience of the player. It is not a thing to be solved now, but it is something to start thinking, as I've already made about 65% of the project.

 

[Gnuoy]

Simply leaving both options on seemed to work well until a recent patch (1.34 i think?), then it seemed HD players were experiencing crashes on my "hybrid" graphics map. So I simply disabled HD in my maps. I know this doesn't answer your question but just thought I would throw in my experience. I would like to accommodate both types of players because I know some players do prefer HD.

 

[Barbafire]

Sharing experience is also valid.

I've searched for some threads here at Hive, to see other opinions, but I did what you said: Disabled HD graphics. We can't let the User Experience be affected by a graphic change.