I just put some stuff in Kolf to display the objects with different colors. It uses QColor::setNamedColor which gives course designers an easy way to use either RGB or CSS colors.
Obviously this is a nice feature 
. But that is not the real point of this post.
The real point of this post is the usage of certain OpenGL extensions we are planning to use. As posted by Stefan Majewsky during last wee there is work being done on a texture-creation application. That application now has a scale option which allows you to use more sizes of textures.
The good thing about this is a better resolution for the terrain (we use 1000×1000 for the grid and 256×256 for the texture at the moment). We could now start using 1000×1000 resolution textures which should make the terrain look nicer.
The problem here is the GL_ARB_texture_non_power_of_two OpenGL extension, which was approved by the OpenGL ARB in 2004. This extension works for Intel 945+, NVIDIA GF2+ and Radeon 7k+ cards. But not on the older Intel cards, S3/VIA chipsets and mobile hardware (it is not an OpenGL ES extension, so buh-bye N810/OpenMoko/Pandora etc.)
Is this still acceptable? Or does this go against the ideas of KDE Everywhere and should it work on hardware? (in this case: force the texture to be a power of 2 one, so max. 1024×1024)
The hardware has gotten so many new features over the last few years which can cause problems for KDE in the next few years. For instance: will we improve Marble for people with OpenCL enabled cards so that it runs and renders up to 50x faster, or do we not start to use these features because most of the people still have old hardware?
As most of use know this is a problem in the whole it world where the fruit company and the really small software company force people to buy new computers, but we cannot really do it. So what is a general support lifetime we should use? (at GCDS I’ve seen people with 6 year old hardware)