While I don't have my own game available to worry about yet, it is something I am thinking about while it is in development.

Now, recently I have been playing a game, and the graphics were glitchy. I thought it must have been the game, but I played another and sure enough it must have been my video drivers.

Now, in my experience, getting updated drivers for my nVidia card was easy. They have basically one file.

But this computer has an ATI Radeon 8500...except it wasn't built by ATI, it was Powered by ATI, meaning that it is possible that another company must provide any drivers. This is confusing because I had to do this a long time ago, going through visiontek's website to find the driver. Now, I was able to use ATI's.

So here I am, thinking, "What happens when I release a game, and the player needs to update his/her drivers and they aren't as persistent? Have I lost a customer? Am I required to do some hand-holding?"

So I ask you. What do you do when you know the problem must be a driver issue (EDIT: or any technical issue really), but the end-user doesn't necessarily have the technical know-how to update?

You just have to do your best, over the years youll learn what drivers have issues with your game. Bear in mind most big companies (EA etc) wont help end users at all with this kind of stuff.
I've found nvidia drivers to be brilliant, ATI drivers to be very flaky and intel i810 chipsets to be worse than useless.

Bear in mind most big companies (EA etc) wont help end users at all with this kind of stuff.

Some interesting reading in the current issue of "PCFormat" (UK) Cliffski.

In a slot called "Friday@5" in which they test out big publishers' tech support lines. Here's the report on Activision:

Tech support can be hit and miss... download the latest drivers... read the FAQ's on their website and they're all out of ideas. ... the team at Activision believes in going the extra mile and cheerfully works its way through hardware diagnostics and OS repairs the really have little bearing on the proper functioning of the game...

I'm sorry I can't add anything to the original question, this just caught my eye.

In time we are selling our games online we had four cases with old drivers.
Three customers had updated drivers and reported success. Forth one in row had agreed that "probably his drivers are wrong but he already tried to change them before and lost all system." He prefered to buy new video card (he has something like old Banshee).
As far as I know we had only one order from that three successfully resolved cases. Anyway, we were quite happy to spend time on help because ALL of them had finally reported that this wasn't any technical problem of our software.

But we are basic 2D. :D
And honestly saying that's why we are so affraid to move into 3D PC area - support issues. :D

PS Saying shortly - Probably the best way should be try to help as far as it is possible and potentially profitable and useful for your company. This is very comfort for both sides in try-before-you-buy case. I suppose much easier than it is on retail market.

Strangely, using OpenGL, I rarely get support requests from users. About 3% of downloaders who can't get the game to work bother to ask for help. Of them, about 5% have said thanks, and of them, 10% bought the game afterwards - which is to say, about 1 person, ever. Which goes to back up my theory that users with shitty graphics cards and no drivers aren't gamers who'd be playing my kind of game in the first place!

Cas :)

Cas,

3% of downloaders isn't too big number?

I mean with appropriate conversion rate in 1% you should have 3 support issues on every 1 sell. :confused:
To get money for a life (one person) from your product you should sell at least 200 copies and resolve 600 support issues per one month. 20 support issues per day? :confused:

Probably I'm incorrect with my calcualtions. Or?..

Yes, your calcs are a bit screwy!
3% of downloaders who can't get the game to work - on Windows about 35% of my downloaders can't run the game, so 3% x 35% = 1% of all my downloaders, approximately (about the same as my conversion rate now :) ). When I was getting 100 downloads a day that meant nearly every day I got an email from someone along the lines of

help i want play alien flux please tell me how thx

Waste of time, by and large :( But I helped every single one of them.

Cas :)

i may be wrong but i think cas means that of the people that cant run the game (remember he does all kinds of weird tracking) only 3% bother to ask for help, its not the total of people that ask for help that download the game

Oh yeah, Cas!

>3% of downloaders who can't get the game to work...

This is something :D

Do you have some connection with Big Brother. How are you calculating all that "can't run the game"? :D

I mean may be you share by your data. How many of ours can't run our games? :D

Well, of course, the magic logs have helped enormously when it comes to figuring out what's actually going wrong :) Everyone should have them.

Cas :)

There are no system requirements on your site
???

Anyway, the game isn't online shooter. Are you doing callbacks in every five minutes of in-game time? :D

Originally posted by WildSnake
Anyway, the game isn't online shooter. Are you doing callbacks in every five minutes of in-game time? :D

There were a bunch of threads on this, with Princec himself starting one or two. :) Here's one of them (http://www.dexterity.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1528).

Wow. I was reading the first page and that was some heavy stuff.

I will read the other 5 pages or so in a bit, but I just wanted to know, is it likely that people will allow such information about their hardware/OS configuration if you do ask them? I can definitely see that it can help in assisting with tech support.

Originally posted by cliffski
I've found nvidia drivers to be brilliant, ATI drivers to be very flaky and intel i810 chipsets to be worse than useless.

Years ago, ATI drivers did have many problems. That has not been the case for at least the last 2+ years.

ATI drivers today are every bit as stable as Nvidia's, if not more so. I use a wide variety of hardware - about a dozen different video cards in total - from both vendors on a regular basis, and can attest to this fact.

- Roulette

I still have nothing but trouble from ATI's drivers, including a regular visit to the BSOD on one ATI machine.

In addition to that they have even missed out a function from ARB_vertex_program which they claim to support. Anyone checking the GL extensions string for support will cheerfully crash the game if they subsequently try to call that function. That's just bad.

GBgames - pretty shortly after that thread started AF started telling users it was sending a log. Since then I've had zero - absolutely zero - complaints, and the download rate and logging rate hasn't changed, so it would seem to be happily resolved. It helps immensely in all manner of incredibly useful ways. As I say - everyone should do it. It's a mutually beneficial arrangement.

Cas :)

This is a consideration, especially with 3D games. Most games that sell are 2D, and drivers aren't really an issue.

However, most of my games are 3D, so I had to learn how to support it properly.

First and foremost, before I do anything, I get their dxdiag.txt using this standard reply.

Hello:

There's a good chance I can help, but I need to know a little about your PC.

The easiest way to do that is to run DX-Diag, and send me the results.
Here's how:
1. From the start menu, do Start->Run
2. In the little box, type in "DXDiag" and click "OK"
3. DXDiag will run for a minute or two.
4. Click on "Save All Information" then click "Save"
5. It will create a file called "DXDiag.txt" on your desktop, send
that file to me. It doesn't reveal any personal information, just the
technical data for your PC.

Best Regards,
Mike Boeh
Retro64, Inc.
http://www.retro64.com


This report gives all the important information about their pc, and people do not seem to have any troubles sending it to me. I then figure out the exact driver they need and send them a direct link to it, along with a little disclaimer... It is VERY rare that someone can't get the game to work. Usually they are having problems with other games too, and this solves it for all of them, so they are very happy.

Out of interest Mike, how many people do actually bother to contact you when it doesn't work? I ask because now I've finally got the proof in front of me it's quite amazing how many people just can't be bothered to make it work. Only the tiniest percentage of people who don't have drivers ever bother to get drivers subsequently despite my best efforts to convince them it's a Good Thing (again, the magic of the Logs tells me this). Patrox has had a lot of success with his Monkey Tool, on the other hand - and that isn't even a game! It just tells them their computer sucks!


Cas :)

@Princec: I honestly do not know. I have always wanted to know, but was afraid to have it report back to my site for fear of being thought of as spyware.

Nice tip on DXDiag Mike! Thank you very much!

My was trying at first to write file in some D:/... folder though.
May be it would be useful to correct your description a little bit.

It would be great to read new variant BTW.
;)

One more time thank you,

Hey no problemo!

Now where is that "Retro Pinball" game you promised to make for me? :D

Well, about the ATI drivers, the problem seemed more to do with the fact that drivers come from any number of different places.

Like I said, I had to go to Visiontek's site to get the drivers originally. Back then, trying to use ATI's drivers would have the installation program telling me that it can't recognize my card. It would say I had 0 MB of onboard RAM! Then I found the Visiontek drivers and those work. Naturally I don't expect Visiontek to do much after that, as far as support.

Now, after all that time, I found that ATI's providing the drivers I need. Imagine having to go through all that as an end user who just wants the game to work!

But yeah, I will definitely look into logging info, and of course I will make sure the player knows this info is being sent. DXDiag would work fine if I was developing for Windows, and I assume with DirectX specific stuff ("Ah, you need to go to windowsupdate to get the latest version of DirectX"), but I will be developing for Linux-based platforms as well (and I hope to do so for the Mac as well, except I don't personally own one so I can see support being difficult). I assume I can simply use lspci to get some info about the hardware. Too bad I can't just ask Loki B-)

Mike:

Unfortunately any pinball is retro now... :D
So, choose any one you like and we'll choose one of yours games in change ;)

Let me choose... Bugotron! My 2 years old daughter likes it very much: "Papa, Bugs! Papa, Bugs!" So, we obviously would sell it better. We know target audience... :D :D :D