OpenGl on windows

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Leginus

Do you guys release stuff in opengl for windows, or is it still a major issue with older machines / drivers?
I have read so many different articles, but they all seem to say that opengl and older machines is a no no

Taking this into account, are the xors3d headers or the irrelicht headers up to date for glbasic, and if not are there any other directx  engines that there are headers for?

Its not an urgent request and I am not wanting people to do the work for me (before the age old "write your own" flame war begins) :nana:   I just thought I would check if anyone is using one or knows of one at the moment, before the task starts of converting one.


Kitty Hello

With "older" machines, we talk about pre 2000 machines, K?

Leginus

one of the articles mentioned problems with nvidia cards such as fx5200 and 5600.  This worried me a little bit as I didnt think they were quite that old?

i dont think the operating system was making much of a difference.
I suppose the other thing is it might only be a very small percentage of people who won't be able to play.

KermEd

Quote from: Leginus on 2011-Jul-14
one of the articles mentioned problems with nvidia cards such as fx5200 and 5600.  This worried me a little bit as I didnt think they were quite that old?

i dont think the operating system was making much of a difference.
I suppose the other thing is it might only be a very small percentage of people who won't be able to play.

Good question, it does and it doesn't.  Operating systems make a huge difference, there are a lot of requirements.  For example, OpenGL is supposed to work a 'certain way'.  But that doesn't mean it actually will on all video cards, on all platforms.  The more common the platform, the more effort that manufacturer will put into that platforms driver.  And the older the hardware the less likely they worked on OpenGL support (especially in the early days).

For example, take Windows 98.  It had a very buggy driver system compared to XP.  Drivers needed to be upgraded by hand manually quite often.  Most video cards were very sketchy on this platform with *any* graphics method.

Next, in Windows XP, drivers are easier to upgrade but still not fantastic.  Drivers can be cumbersome, but so many people have XP and it has such a high amount of focus developers focus on creating extremely stable drivers.

With Windows 7 and on, drivers are more automatic in terms of updating.  Still not perfect, but better.

QuoteI suppose the other thing is it might only be a very small percentage of people who won't be able to play.

With *any* graphics library there will always be a small number of people who experience problems.  This could be problems from the video card manufacturer,  OS, development problems, etc.  The problems plague everything from OpenGL, DirectX, etc.

As a developer, you will - at some point - need to create troubleshooting materials and work with end-users to identify problems no matter what you do.  Also, I have always found DirectX to be less portable than OpenGL.  As it requires a very specific type of computer & system installation to use.

In my personal opinion, OpenGL is more reliable on older systems than things like DirectX which is far less portable.  If I was working on an 'optimum' graphics library though, I would jump into C++ and write up a graphics library that uses *only* the features I need.  That's really the only way to minimize potential failures and to make sure you can fix and resolve any issues.

With all of that said, OpenGL is very safe by most standards and would do better than many graphics libraries in development.  Hope it helps!  And this is all opinion based so - as always - take it with a grain :)

Ed

Leginus

Thanks Ed and Kitty. 
I suppose the point that was made makes a lot of sense, e.g. you will need to provide user support regardless of which engine you go with.

Ideally I would like to use opengl due to using the in built engine, but i may look to wrapping a directx engine for future bigger projects, and code the games in a way so that I can then offer both with any releases.

At least is keeps us off of the streets :)
(although, if the coding didn't, my wife certainly would  =D)

Kitty Hello

GLBasic is out since 2000 or so. So, I did a lot of effort to get it working on the machines back then. GLBasic has a fallback mode for almost anything if a card does not support this or that feature.

The only problem you might encounter, is when very old computer have no opengl drivers installed. GLBasic programs will yield a warning then, though.

Leginus

Wow I didnt realise that it was created 11 years ago.  Well if you tested things and they were working mostly ok back then, hopefully that will have eliminated nearly most of the possible incompatibilities now :)

It will certainly make life a lot easier
Thanks for your help and of course great efforts on Glbasic  :good: