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When I created the original background, 1024x768 was nearly unheard of for a baseline resolution. Virtually every other 3D program used a blurry 640x480 background.
You are right -- time marches on and what was considered a high-end card 2 years ago is now almost universal. While I will still try to maintain a low common denominator, some of the lowest-end cards (like an 8-meg Rage Pro) may drop off the bottom of the accaeptable list.
All the original artwork I'm now doing is geared for a resolution of 1600x1200. Whether or not that becomes the baseline resolution for the Freshwater Aquarium or the next version of the Saltwater tank remains to be seen, but at least the artwork will have the detail to support it.
It's conceivable that there would be both low-end and high-end versions, with the hi-res version being about 4 times the filesize of the normal one. It might seem that everyone would just go straight for that one, but there are serious drawbacks to running a high-res program on a machine limited to 1024x768. If you look at normal-sized fish at that res, the fish may be about 64 pixels long. If a 256x256 texture is mapped onto that fish instead of a 64x64 texture, not only are 15/16 of the pixels wasted, but they cause all kinds of "sparkling" aliasing problems. Only at very high resolutions is there any real advantage.
Maintaining the code base for high- and low-res versions would increase the workload significantly for Prolific. Amazingly, there are already over 25 different versions of the current Aquarium which have to be maintained.
The development tools which Prolific has been creating can really come in handy when creating fish or backgrounds. For example, I can have the Aquarium running in a window, and Lightwave filling up the rest of the screen. When I modify and save a fish (or other object) from Lightwave, it instantly shows up in the Aquarium. This greatly streamlines the dev process.
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