Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

In revisions 3.0-691 and 3.0-692 the two options 'remove lighting' and 'remove textures' were removed... Just curious as to... why?!

Probably because they were useless to the vast majority of Dolphin users. While they may have been useful for a select few, such limited and specific options tend to clutter the GUI while helping only a handful. As far as I know, those options didn't solve any issues, and based on some of the posts we get in the Support forum, they actually cause problems, e.g. threads asking why the game now has "ugly" graphics. Maybe a dev can give a more exact answer.

Disable Lighting in particular was removed because an annoyingly large amount of people came to the website, read the crappy performance guide, checked "Disabled Lighting" and wondered why stuff broke.

Plus, what Shonumi said.

You didn't fully answer his question guys. The reason why it was completely removed instead of just changing the default value to disabled was to eliminate some code to make the dolphin code a bit cleaner.

(06-21-2012, 01:30 PM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]You didn't fully answer his question guys. The reason why it was completely removed instead of just changing the default value to disabled was to eliminate some code to make the dolphin code a bit cleaner.

True, in a sense, none of us individually answered the OP's question fully, but that's due to the fact that there are various reasons for the complete removal of Disable Lighting/Textures, not just one specifically.

1. Disable Lighting/Textures was useless.
2. Supporting it was annoying and troublesome.
3. Code eliminated for project maintainence.

All three could equally warrant this removal rather than simply unchecking the options by default. Users might enable it anyway, especially if they don't know what they're doing (which, in my experience, happens a lot). In that light, any of the above is a valid reason to gut those options entirely.

But simply disabling it would solve the first two and be a lot easier. You need to understand the third reason to really understand why it was REMOVED not disabled.

(06-22-2012, 03:22 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]You need to understand the third reason to really understand why it was REMOVED not disabled.

Not really. I think you're looking at it as if the third reason is the only one that explains complete removal, but I don't think that's necessarily true. Code cleanup could be the result, but not always the underlying reason. If the goal was to remove useless features period, code cleanup becomes a beneficial side effect, not the primary reason for removal. Additionally, if those features were deemed too burdensome to maintain in any form (enabled/disabled) then their removal likewise cleans up the code as a side effect. In either case, code cleanup's not the driving force dictating removal. Then again, all three reasons likely played an influence on this decision.

Actually, the 3rd reason was the least likely. There being no real reason to use those "features" and users who didn't know what they were doing enabling them were reason number one, as far as I know. Just disabling them isn't enough as desperate users searching for more speed would find reasons to click those options for no reason.

I'll give you a fourth reason which bscly boils down to: The feature is useless. Why keep it then?

Read reason 1.