Beware of making them!!

Publisher will refuse your games "because is OpenGL".

<voice in my head>
Star Wars: Knight of the Old Republic - OpenGL 1.5 ONLY - sold over 1 million copies in the world
Neverwinter Nights - OpenGL only - sold more than 1 million worldwide

Also you'll be able to do an instant mac port (even better if you use PTK (https://www.plimus.com/jsp/download_trial.jsp?contractId=1634217&referrer=rei1974) )
and we all know that mac and linux market is dead right? :D

<voice in my head>
my puzzle game sells 5x more on mac platform...

And there are a lot of compatibility issues with OpenGL drivers!

<voice in my head>
hmm then why Nvidia and ATI just released new versions of their driver with full opengl compatibility? why often opengl versions of games run faster?

So remember, all of you: DON'T ABSOLUTELY MAKE OPENGL GAMES!!!

Whoa, what happened? :)

Ahhh!!! Wot?? No opengl?? I'm screwed then... :mad:

Seriously though: I remeber someone here posting (I think it was the guy who wrote "miko and molly") that opengl does have some support issues.

I'll still stick to opengl - if it's good enough for Carmack then it's good enough for me.

grimreaper

Whoa, what happened?
nothing, just a suggestion for other developers who are scared by the tiny, harmless, cute OpenGL libs ;)

The next WindowsXP service pack (SP2) puts OpenGL back into XP.

Well, you know what ? I don't care anymore.
I had a really bad "journey" trying to decide what to use for my upcoming game. I try GDI, DirectDraw, DirectDraw with a lot of custom blitting functions, Direct3D 7, Direct3D 8 and finally OpenGL. And my choice (finaly) is OpenGL. After making some demos like this one (http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=9716) i really like this API.
In a few years all systems will support OpenGL. Well, most of them support it now. I want to make a game full of eye-candy. Why i must stick to the 2-d only graphics to please a customer with a 124-year old graphics card and not explore the advantages of dynamic lighting or sphere mapping and please the user with a new system (new >= 4 years old)?
And there is something more. I LIKE opengl. I CHOOSE to write some indie games because i LIKE programming and games. Why I must use an API that i don't like? To earn more money? If it was all about the money, i woulnd't bother at all. I whould stick to my current job and live happily with no more effort bla bla bla...
I'm not sure if you understand this but anyway, this is my opinion...
George.

If it was all about the money, i woulnd't bother at all. I whould stick to my current job and live happily with no more effort bla bla bla...
the fact is that if you choose opengl and port the game to other platform, you really earn more money... ;)

Originally posted by Jack_Norton
<voice in my head>
Star Wars: Knight of the Old Republic - OpenGL 1.5 ONLY - sold over 1 million copies in the world
Neverwinter Nights - OpenGL only - sold more than 1 million worldwide



Well if I thought LucasArts and/or Atari were going to publish my games, I wouldn't give it a second thought, but something tells me they're not ;)

Well if I thought LucasArts and/or Atari were going to publish my games, I wouldn't give it a second thought, but something tells me they're not
those number are just to show that there are quite some people in the world who can actually play OpenGL games ;)
of course I am not even attempting to compare my games to those...:rolleyes:

The majority of players have OpenGL drivers, simple as that (don't forget those Mac gurls).

Cas :)

For modern videocards D3D or OpenGL doesn't make much difference - almoste all D3D functionality is present in OpenGL. Small part which arn't present - managed usage of texture/vertex buffers only imortant for large-scale (really large 500+Mb databases) streaming graphics engines (terrain engines mostly), which aren't used in modern games anyway.

The next WindowsXP service pack (SP2) puts OpenGL back into XP.


Really? That's great news.

The next WindowsXP service pack (SP2) puts OpenGL back into XP.

From Gamasutra 64-bit Game Development (http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20040603/pournelle_pfv.htm):

OpenGL is now a grudgingly accepted citizen. Since late in the NT 4.0 era, Microsoft hasn't wanted to support OpenGL, preferring to evangelize DirectX as the One True Way to display 3D. Between the graphics chip vendors doing their own OpenGL drivers, and the big CAD companies continuing to require it, Microsoft has put OpenGL support back into the operating system, so you can rely on it being there.

>The next WindowsXP service pack (SP2) puts OpenGL back into XP.

Sounds good.

Oh and requiring an opengl driver sounds more complicated than it is. For I don't know how many years it just means that the customer needs to install the drivers for his/her graphics card. Duh. No big deal really :)

I'd love to do OpenGL, but the only decent GUI system I can find is written in Direct3D8, and I just don't have the time (or real desire) to write my own for OpenGL.

If anyone has some source *cough* code, I'd be eternally gratefull and wouldn't have to be locked to the PC..

To be fair I think there's a difference between KOTOR or Neverwinter Nights being picked up by a publisher and the typical indie game. If someone decides to spend $50 on a title then they'll be more likely to go and make the effort to have decent opengl drivers installed. And more likely to know what they actually are. Download a shareware game and if it doesn't work it's too easy to just move on, plenty more other games to see.

One of the reasons for aiming at people who have a 124 year old graphics card is that there are a lot of them about. Majority of people I know who have good gfx cards would rather use them to play Far Cry than a breakout game with bumpmapped gfx.

I don't understand the api argument either. Sure, OpenGL is nice but you only have to mess with whatever api once. Write your libary and it's job done. And if you write your library sensibly you can drop in another renderer.

"the fact is that if you choose opengl and port the game to other platform, you really earn more money... ".

There may have been a winky smiley thing at the end but statements like this can be dangerous. Do you mean more money becase PC+Mac > PC or that Mac > PC? It might hold true for the odd game but I'd hazard a guess that a good game that sells will sell more on PC simply because there are way more PC's about that people use to play indie games on. Why are the majority of games on the big portals PC and not Mac? Someone starting out could read that and go for opengl when it's not really the best choice for them.

Compatibility is a problem. It may be as simple as installing drivers but what's simple for us is just hassle for someone else. My dad wouldn't know what a driver is if it slapped him round the face. Telling him to download new drivers would be a waste of time - he doesn't even know what graphic card he has. Telling him to download a windows service pack would be no use either. It all comes down to how computer savvy your target market is. Casual puzzle game market isn't very savvy at all so far in my experience.

Imagine you're the publisher and you know that a number of people who download a game is going to come back with tech support issues regarding not having drivers. If this was 1 or 2 people a week not so bad but you'd expect a publisher to have a lot more purely down to volume of downloads. Couple that with all the technical support for all the other games they have and it would take a lot of time, effort and therefore money to fix all these things. It doesn't surprise me at all that some publishers would shy away from OpenGL for now. Maybe they're right?

Personally I'd stick to DirectX for PC, as low a version as you can get away with to hit the largest target audience. If/When we do a Mac version I'll just rewrite my library keeping the same API. Considerng the api is quite clean ( mymouse = Image_Load("mouse.bmp") ) it won't be difficult. Will take a bit longer than if I had just used OpenGL but it appears it's not always an "instant" conversion anyway.

Oh and Jack... maybe you sell 5 times as less of your PC version of your puzzle game than mac because you're using OpenGL? Maybe you would have better sales if you switched your pc version to direct x? Just a thought.

scott

One of the reasons for aiming at people who have a 124 year old graphics card is that there are a lot of them about. Majority of people I know who have good gfx cards would rather use them to play Far Cry than a breakout game with bumpmapped gfx.
You sure about this?
If someone hasn't even the money to upgrade the pc, do you expect that he will be buying lot of games? I think that the one who have the latest gfx card will be interested in (GOOD) indie games as well.
Also lot of women recently (I think less than 2-3 years) started to buy online, and they haven't so old pc I believe...

Oh and Jack... maybe you sell 5 times as less of your PC version of your puzzle game than mac because you're using OpenGL? Maybe you would have better sales if you switched your pc version to direct x? Just a thought.
Don't know, maybe it could be that reason, or maybe simply because Pc market is saturated by those damn Popcap games :D

According to my statistics he'd see at the very most a 50% increase in PC sales for writing a whole new DirectX rendering layer. Sounds tempting except that the 50% figure is unrealistically high and is likely to some fraction of that depending on the kinds of people that only have OEM drivers and the kind of game.

This is something that many DirectX diehards haven't taken into account: OpenGL is installed by all the major vendors by the very first driver update the user installs.

This means that users without OpenGL drivers are necessarily also using OEM version DirectX drivers and have never upgraded their systems. Which would consequently put them in a very special market segment: they are probably at work and aren't allowed to, or the machine is simply older and crankier than the average household machine; or they really are utterly casual users and targeting performance orientated games at them is very possibly a complete waste of time in the first place.

Cas :)

Which reminds me, I'm changing my game message from

Your computer needs OpenGL drivers to run this game! etc.

to

Your computer is too old and slow to run this game! But you can make it fast enough by downloading new video drivers from ... etc.

Which I think will help a few people out.

Cas :)

Good explanation :)

...hmm now I have one less excuse to justify why spin around doesn't sell well :o

You sure about this?
If someone hasn't even the money to upgrade the pc, do you expect that he will be buying lot of games? I think that the one who have the latest gfx card will be interested in (GOOD) indie games as well.
Also lot of women recently (I think less than 2-3 years) started to buy online, and they haven't so old pc I believe...


According to princec's stats you could get a 50% increase in sales. Most of the people I know who haven't upgraded their pc haven't done so purely because the pc meets their needs. All they do is use Word, Excel and play the occaisional word game.

As regards the OEM Direct X thing I've never come across that as a problem. Our low spec games use Direct X 3 and Party Bowling is DirectX 8. We have never had a single tech support request that has had anything to do with directx. Might be because if they haven't got dx8 then they just move on to another game and pretty much everything can run dx 3. The games even work on NT 4 IIRC.

According to princec's stats you could get a 50% increase in sales. Most of the people I know who haven't upgraded their pc haven't done so purely because the pc meets their needs. All they do is use Word, Excel and play the occaisional word game.
Probably I could get more sales, no doubt about it, however I prefer it to be portable to Mac. Also spin around on BFG sold much more than on my site (even if not very well considering the exposure) so probably I'd need more marketing :)

I honestly don't think that a game needs to be using DX3 to sell better, even for casual market. My site stats for last days shows that over 53% use XP (DX 8 installed) and 16% win98 (DX 5 installed).

Anyway the casual gamer market isn't my target right now :cool:
(that's a good excuse!)

eh, just use something like the ogre engine and ignore the whole situation :) After all it's opengl AND dx and compiles on win/mac and linux AND is free with an lgpl licence, problem solved! :D

Yes Ogre is cool.... the problem is that I am not a great programmer and for now I'll stick with 2D games :)

I've been playing with OGRE lately, and I like it so far. The design is very elegant, the API is clean. However, it's still at 0.14 and while almost everything works, some features aren't ready yet (the ones I ran into : stencil shadows aren't quite optimized, there are many terrain engines and none of them is "finished"), and so on.

Anyway, I have tremendous faith in OGRE. I've had some email exchange with the main developer, he's a great guy, he puts a lot of work in OGRE and it's also very active in the forums - BTW, the community is very helpful and full of very knowledgeable people.

And there's a dedicated Java wrapper for it too :)

Cas :)

princec: you couldn't help yourself could you ;) Mind you that's a very good thing and I really hope it is maintained.

Jack_Norton: yep same here :confused: :rolleyes: , but I'm keeping an eagle eye on the game frameworks that are being built for it now. The most promising one I think is www.yake.org as it is built using Ogre for gfx, OpenAl for sound, Ode for physics and most importantly for me (and you :)) lua scripting. I like the look of lua so hopefully I can make games with minimal c++age and not go mad.