[casual_games] Risks of using OpenGL in casual games

[James Terry]

I agree in line with what Ron Carmel said, relying on software rendering, you won't be able to get the quality you may want. There are a lot of solutions in which you can support OpenGL and a DirectX version that has software rendering. If the system can't run OpenGL, you revert to DirectX.

You run into this a lot on the old onboard Intel cards, they may support OpenGL, but the drivers are very, very out of date (for most users)

Also, since Win98/ME went out of support over a year ago, the usage of it has dropped a lot more, and I think Win2000 is the last MS supported OS that went out on a lot of machines without hardware accelerated video cards. Even the most basic Intel onboard cards that come on Dell/HP/Compaq/Gateway/etc Windows XP machines can support DX7 and usually OpenGL if drivers have been updated.

Better to support both unless you are using a unique feature to one that can't possibly be achieved on the other, as you will have a greater compatibility range of people downloading your game and it working.

Now if you are aiming at a wide deployment at Win95/98/NT4 machines, hardware acceleration can start to get murky. 

James R. Terry
Game Developer
Yatec Games 
(225) 274-1550 Ext. 104
jterry at yatecgames.com
www.yatecgames.com 


-----Original Message-----
From: casual_games-bounces at igda.org [mailto:casual_games-bounces at igda.org] On Behalf Of Jose Marin
Sent: Wednesday, October 31, 2007 6:08 AM
To: casual_games at igda.org
Subject: [casual_games] Risks of using OpenGL in casual games

Hi.

I would like to know your opinion about using OpenGL in casual games.

We want to make games fun to play and with great visuals.

To achieve this great visuals, OpenGL would be a good choice, because it would allow us to use several special effects and hardware acceleration.

On the other hand, OpenGL needs a 3D card (doesn´t need to be a powerfull card) to run decently.


What do you think about that?


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