[casual_games] Risks of using OpenGL in casual games

[James Terry]

Even without a driver supporting OpenGL, both Vista and XP revert to
software rendering for it (albeit on laptops that is going to have poor
performance)

You can't expect people to download drivers to play your game in the
casual space, so might as well implement DirectX and OpenGL, see which
one is supported (or which extensions of OpenGL are available) and
switch to the video mode that will give you the most features on the
platform you are on. 

Probably also give an option somewhere to force a change of the
rendering mode, even if it is just a couple shortcuts to Safe Mode
(OpenGL) and Safe Mode (DirectX) for the people who read through your
readme.txt or troubleshooting section for the game.

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 Brian Robbins
Sent: Wednesday, October 31, 2007 8:44 AM
To: IGDA Casual Games SIG Mailing List
Subject: Re: [casual_games] Risks of using OpenGL in casual games


> 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support OpenGL, but the drivers are very, very out of date (for most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)


Actually in my experience I've seen a lot less support for OpenGL on
very new computers. Laptops in particular that ship with Vista. I know
that this will get resolved in the coming months, but I know that ATI
in particular did not have a good (any?) OpenGL implementation in
their Vista drivers until recently. Given the way laptop drivers are
rolled out those won't even reach consumers for a while.

Couple that with the fact that it's a really bad idea to ask most
casual users to update their drivers anyway, and you definitely can't
count on having OpenGL available.

I'd be surprised if you had a significant number of users without any
3d acceleration, but I think you'll definitely want to support Direct
X.


-- 
Brian Robbins
Executive Producer and Gaming Evangelist
Fuel Industries - www.fuelgames.com
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