Selling OpenGL only games on Windows
Hi. I didn't want to threadjack another thread (How to Diversify?) (and I was a little late in replying anyway) but I just wanted to throw in my own experience with OpenGL in Outpost Kaloki in case it's useful to anyone and in case anyone has suggestions.
We discovered a lot more PC customers with problems running OpenGL than we exected. I have no specific stats, unfortunately, but I know that a notable number of people didn't have OpenGL 1.2, which our game required. Just among employee friends and family alone, we had at least two people who had upgraded to XP SP2 and somehow had the generic Microsoft software OpenGL 1.1 drivers, even though they had nice 3D hardware.
In our latest release, we support OpenGL 1.1. The Microsoft software drivers report 1.1 and the game runs on such a system, but excruciatingly slowly. So, we added a message to the game saying something like "it looks like you have generic software opengl drivers - you should go download updated drivers for your video card."
A big problem with OpenGL is that there isn't a single specific place I can send the user for updated drivers. It depends on their video card manufacturer.
And I'm fairly convinced that reasonably casual gamers won't go download new drivers, and half the time wouldn't know how even if they wanted to.
In summary, I'm convinced that going OpenGL-only hurt our sales, though I agree with comments others have made that the ability to go to the Mac and Linux more than makes up for this. An OpenGL AND Direct3D solution is clearly superior, though it's more work.
We simply expected OpenGL 1.2 to be pretty much everywhere, and it turned out it wasn't.
If anyone has stats on the install base of various versions of OpenGL, I sure would be interested in hearing about it.
Here's a little something Little Soldiers leverages from phelios. It's the Driver Update System (DUS). Essentially you just install it as an icon in the program group. If the user is having problems they can run the DUS, it will query an online database of over 800 videocards (and growing) with links to download the latest drivers. There has been a noticble increase in sales since using this.
http://www.phelios.net/updatevideodrivers.html
Dan MacDonald
a prisoner of the cause
That's very cool!
I'm surprised that with over 800 video cards, it reports having no entry for mine: a GeForce4 Ti 4600.
In addition, there's a "Get Direct-X" button but nothing for OpenGL. Is there some way this tool applies to OpenGL? Little Soldiers looks like it's OpenGL-based, so how does this help Little Soldiers?
Also, do you launch the DUS installer as part of your game install? It's another license agreement to read, etc., but I guess the upside is worth it?
Thanks!
I've got stat's. Let's have a look...Originally Posted by stay
Notes: the 1.1 drivers are hardware accelerated; that is, we count Microsoft software rendering as a failure. All other logs are from successful unique game installs where the game has been played at least once.Code:Failed 4558 1.1 1842 1.2 532 1.3 4167 1.4 3628 1.5 1573 2.0 154
Unlike DirectX programming in OpenGL you must always check for the availability of an extension and furthermore it is always strongly recommended to provide a basic OpenGL 1.1 rendering path as a baseline. According to my stats, 72% of my downloaders have hardware accelerated GL drivers capable of playing any of our games.
Cas
Didn't there used to be a website with a web-based OpenGL driver auto-updater? I guess it's probably not around anymore, but I remember a website that devs/publishers would refer customers to.
hi,
I've noticed that a lot of users who have problems with opengl usually have an intel graphics extreme card. In particular, they are the 82865G and 82810E models although I suspect all intel graphics extreme cards to have the problems.
After a lot of hair pulling, I realized that most of the problems were because intel's drivers implements the bare minimum ogl spec. For me, that means that you cannot push more than 1 or 2 (can't remember exactly right now) projection matricies on the stack at a time. If you did, the graphics would get all skewed and later transforms will fail.
Anyway... I don't have any stats, but from talking to players from my game and analyzing message board threads/feedback/bug reports, I've found this to be a major issue. I thought I'd just throw this out there.
-j
ps: It might be helpful to actually buy one of these cards since they seem to be the most finicky.
Queasy Games by Jonathan Mak
Yeah, actually I've seen that happen a lot. I get an INVALID_OPERATION error when my games init so I bomb out early (sounds like you're not checking for GL errors, tsk!). And they can't vsync.
Cas
That would be glsetup.com - unfortunately it's gone.
>After a lot of hair pulling, I realized that most of the problems were because
>intel's drivers implements the bare minimum ogl spec. For me, that means that
>you cannot push more than 1 or 2 (can't remember exactly right now)
>projection matricies on the stack at a time.
Bare minimum would be 4, no?
>And they can't vsync.
*gasp*
princec: actually, it's from checking the errors that i finally narrowed down the problem to the deal with projection matricies. it's true, i wasn't checking before then tho
oNyx: i can't excatly remember where i read it so i did a search:
http://web.drzeus.cx/opengl/icd.html
if you scroll down, one of the charts shows the ogl require minimum for projection stack depth is 2.
Also, on www.opengl.org (specifically http://www.opengl.org/resources/feat...es/oglpitfall/ )
there's a paragraph that reads:
(bold emphasis mine)OpenGL mandates that all implementations must provide at least a 32-entry modelview matrix stack, a 2-entry projection matrix stack, and a 2-entry texture matrix stack. Implementations are free to provide larger stacks, and glGetIntergerv provides a means to query an implementation's actual maximum depth.
-j
Queasy Games by Jonathan Mak
My laptop (a Dell SmartPC 100N) has an Intel Extreme Graphics 82830M. I've not had any problems with OpenGL, but it doesn't support Direct3D in hardware, not even D3D7.
As far as I can tell this is the opposite of the norm, where most users have some Direct3D support (even though their drivers aren't the latest) but shoddy OpenGL support.
Thanks for clarification, queasy.
Fortunately I'm only using 2 *phew*
Thanks for the feedback, y'all. This conversation is definitely giving me a better idea of what problems are out there. I agree that the norm is sometimes shoddy OpenGL support.
Cas: Wow, great stats, thanks! That's a much bigger percentage of 1.1 users than I would have expected. I'm suddenly even MORE glad we dropped our minimum to 1.1 in the latest release. Our conversion rate seemed to go up noticeably in the last month, but we changed several things at once, so it's tough to know how much that affected it.
The reason we didn't simply count software 1.1 as a failure was that we kept running into friends (and even our own test computers) who had software 1.1 but *could* have run the game fine with the proper drivers. So, the custom message for that specific case gives a bit more information and tries to encourage them to update their drivers, but then goes ahead and runs the game at turtle speeds.
I have hopes that this will result in more people getting the game to work, but in reality it's probably a pretty small percentage. Heck, I play a lot of games and I almost never update anything on my system just because it's required by one downloaded game.
When I had trouble getting my OpenGL game to run the drivers that gave me problems were NVIDIA and ATI. NVIDIA and ATI had perfectly good OpenGL drivers available for the hardware in question, but those drivers were not installed. I still don’t understand how a NVIDIA driver with a 2003 release date could not have support for OpenGL. But the driver that Windows Update for Windows ME downloaded was the Microsoft version of the TNT2 driver that supports Direct3D and not OpenGL.
Thank you for sharing this data. That is very helpful. How recent is this data? Is it everything from the past 3 months or the past 12 months or is it from a single month 12 months ago?
That's since September 2003. It started out at around 65% but it's creeping up.
Cas
This was the deliberate scuppering of OpenGL perpetrated by Microsoft that I mentioned in that flametastic Microsoft thread.
Cas
Ahh, too bad about that. According to archive.org, it looks like they were last live Sept. 2003, but the page that was there in Sept. 2003 had it's latest glsetup version dated Sept. 2001. So they apparently stagnated for a couple years, then finally took the site down.
Don't suppose there's enough developer support and interest to get something like that going again?
Phelios has done one, and it's excellent. URL was mentioned a couple of days ago...
Cas
What Phelios has done is great. However I can't get it to recognize my card and I think it's a pretty common card.
ASUS RADEON A9550
The tool can only be as good as the database being updated on a regular basis.
It'll only get updated if you tell him!
Cas
Two days ago it didn't have my card (GeForce4 Ti 4600) and today it does.
Before, when it didn't have info about my card, the only mention of a graphics API was the DirectX button on the side, which wasn't at all what I wanted. Now that my card is listed, I see that it says something about OpenGL in the "advice" line.
I'm adding the drivers as they are submitted, it takes a few minutes everyday. The first days after release were busy though.
The comments are quite light right now, but it'll improve over time. I've got a few nifty ideas to automate most of the process that i'll add in there once i find a few hours to program them.
Feel free to bundle dus with your game, it's "free at your own risk" .
I just saw self installable ATI graphics on ACER laptops ( no clicks required ), i wonder where i could get this installer...
pat.
Your DUS is working great for me... already 3 users that were able to use UBM getting the correct drivers thanks to it!
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LittleSoldiers uses PTK which is a 2D library built over GL. The DUS is simply added as an option in the program group and the help file indicates that the user should run it if they have problems running the game.
What happens when a user runs the tool is that their card is queried and the information sent to the DUS database. If there is an entry there for the latest drivers they see that info. If not phelios has a web based form that they can use to add dirver information and URL's for that paticular card. I guess no one has used DUS with a G force 4 TI before (I suspect because anyone with that card isn't having GL problems)
With regards to how this helps LittleSoldiers, the more people who can successfully run the demo, the more potential customers LittleSoldiers has
Dan MacDonald
a prisoner of the cause
Does that apply to stay only, or to everyone?
I haven't been able to find any link to DUS on Phelios.com though.
Last edited by stan; 01-20-2005 at 06:11 AM.
Does that apply to stay only, or to everyone?
I haven't been able to find any link to DUS on Phelios.com though.
Yes, just pm or email me, i'll give you access to the driver and stat page too.
pat.
Thanks for taking the time to explain how the tool works Dan. It's good to know that Patrox has a method to update the database easily. Great job Patrox, we really appreciate your effort on this.
I got thinking about this issue some. I'm wondering if there is an easy way of detecting if the user's machine doesn't have an OpenGL driver installed (or better a decent enough driver), while running the installer script and then launch the DUS utility if needed. Since this is done at install time, the user would less likely have a problem running the game (fixing it before the problem occurs). Part of this would depend on the capabilities of the installer, of course.
Would this approach work well enough or are there some caveats I'm missing?
Actually it's very likely to succeed. I think you can call arbitrary DLL functions from NSIS.
Cas
How do you detect if hardware accelerated OpenGL drivers are installed?
Are there any OpenGL calls that detect it?
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