Gamedev Lounge 0010

[Hoeloe]

Making it run on 'anything' is always going to be impossible. There are so many different specifications out there that you just aren't going to be able to do them all. Also, with a language like C++, you'll need to make sure it works on different OS' and different processors, since it compiles down to a binary, and a program that runs fine on an ARM processor may not work on a MIPS one, etc.

However, what you said has some merit, in that you shouldn't just go for the top-end computer, since that will exclude your audience. Also, keep in mind that most machines WILL NOT HAVE more than 4GB of RAM. This is because, despite a transition happening, most machines still use a 32-bit address space. Each byte in your computer memory has an address. With a 32-bit machine, this stores an address as a 32-bit integer. This means that the maximum address you can get is 4294967295. This means you can only store up to 4294967295 bytes of information in your computer at any one time (ignoring and HDD or SDDs you may have, since they need loading into RAM first, usually), and this gives you 4GB of available memory. Not matter how much more you put in, you can never get any more out of it unless you upgrade to a 64-bit machine.

In short, you'll want to try and make sure your game can run with less than 4GB of RAM at any one time. This shouldn't be a problem, but it's something to consider.