If someone tries to run my game on very old hardware, like a 2011 Mac, my game will just crash due to HDRP throwing an exception. Ideally I’d be able to detect that HDRP will crash if they continue past an initial screen, and present a helpful warning.
This would depend on two things: 1) Being able to detect the crash condition, and 2) Being able to display/render a message, despite HDRP not running on this kind of hardware.
Is anyone handling this kind of thing in their game? I find it’s a pretty unfortunately state if the game just crashes under fairly common/predictable situations like this, and it would be much better to give a friendly error instead.
The “early warning” is the thing I’m wondering if it’s technical possible. And I’m not really sure how to test this, without finding a very old computer. Basically, as soon as someone gets past the Unity splash screen, nothing will render from that point on if HDRP isn’t supported. So I’m not sure there’s any way to display a message to the player in that case.
Running a separate process is an interesting idea. I’m not sure whether launching another process within the game will set off some red flags, though. That sounds kind of sketch. But I guess this sounds a little like how some games have a dedicated “Launcher” that does some diagnostics, then proceeds to actually run the game.