This is mostly a question for Steve or his crew. :cool: But I thought others might be interested in the answers.

I'm interested in knowing more about the average Dexterity game player and their PC. I know it has DirectX 5 and a 56K modem (http://www.dexterity.com/developer/faq-technical-specs.htm), but what else? For instance, machine speed, RAM, OS, and graphic capabilities. For the latter, do you recommend we aim for 640 x 480 x 16 and no spare video ram, or something higher? Do they prefer windowed games to full-screen, or do they demand both? Do they have hardware cursors? And do they favor the mouse or keyboard for input? Inquiring minds want to know.

I'm doing the technical design on my game this week and these are some of the questions I've been dealing with.

I know that Steve has mentioned something about 50yr old grandmothers playing with 3yr old computers in another thread. So u'd better get yer granny and use her for beta-testing...

Seriously, it would be great to know what the typical Dexterity client demographics are like: age, gender (40% are female, but what's their average age?), and typical machine specs: OS, CPU, RAM, graphics / sound card etc. Oh, and that 56k modem :)

Brian Azzopardi
(writing this on a duel P4 2Ghz with 1GB of ram and a GF4Ti4600; no, I'm not yer typical Dexterity customer :) )

I'm afraid we don't have that level of detail of info on our players.

We do have many customers that want to play games in windowed mode, so if your game can run in both full-screen and windowed mode, that is helpful. Some players like to use the mouse, others the keyboard. But to know what effect such details would have on sales is something we can't do with any accuracy yet. The best advice I can give would be to design with flexibility in mind.

Originally posted by Dexterity
I'm afraid we don't have that level of detail of info on our players.

I hope you don't my being presumptous here but: wouldn't it be great idea for the games you publish to write a simple log file with the relevant techincal details and when a user registers they are asked whether they want to send this info?

Or else you can give clients the option to fill in the tech specs after they register the game through the web site.

You could also package this with the installer, etc. If MS can do it, so can we right?

Brian Azzopardi

This is what I’m shooting for my game:

233 – 400 Mhz Processor
32 – 64 Megs of RAM
Less than 8 Megs of video RAM
DirectX 7.0 or lower

I have two machines that fit within that range. Here’s how some of Dexterity’s games run on them:

Aargon and Dweep – flawless
Pharaohs' Curse – a little slow
Strayfire – locks up before it makes it to the main menu

On rather to use fullscreen or windowed, I think it matters on your game. The same with using keyboard or mouse. This is only my opinion though, and I don’t know if I’m the “average Dexterity game player.” :D

Thanks for the tips. Here's my thinking so far.

Keyboard/Mouse: I'm designing with the keyboard in mind, but if I have time I'll add some path-finding and mouse support to the gameplay.

Windowed/Full: I'm doing some speed tests right now using the SDL (http://www.libsdl.org), and I'm finding (for my hardware-accelerated gfx card) that full-screen is faster and supports page flipping very well. I think page flipping is easier to work with, but in windowed mode it's emulated much slower. I can write the game so it starts up in windowed/full based on a user preference, that's no problem, but I have to optimize it for one way or the other. Also, vram. If we're talking REALLY OLD video cards w/1 MB, there's no room for a second hardware surface, so page flipping is out. Maybe the easiest way to answer this question is if you use a low-end test box, which I imagine you do. If so, what kind of card is in it?

Graphics mode: Flexibility for 2D in the resolution is either a lot of work (for differently sized graphics) or ugly (scaling). I'd rather target a specific size: Most Dexterity games seem to be 640 x 480, so that's what I'm targetting. As for color, I'm assuming 16 bit. If anyone is in 32-bit it shouldn't affect the game, and the chance of someone being in 640 x 480 x 8 seems remote. However, I am probably going to store the animations as 8-bit graphics to save space.

Ram: This is a consideration, because I'm thinking of having different tilesets, but only one needs to be in memory at a time. Having it all in memory would make level transitions faster, however. I suppose I could check to see if available memory is there and load/unload on the fly but that's just another thing to extend the development cycle. How much ram is in your low-end text box? 32M? Or =gasp= is it lower?
:D

By the way, people interested in this thread may also be interested in Gil Zussman's DirectX8 -> 5? (http://www.dexterity.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=19) thread.

Originally posted by Grimreaper
I hope you don't my being presumptous here but: wouldn't it be great idea for the games you publish to write a simple log file with the relevant techincal details and when a user registers they are asked whether they want to send this info?

Or else you can give clients the option to fill in the tech specs after they register the game through the web site.

You could also package this with the installer, etc. If MS can do it, so can we right?


Sure, we could do this, but presently we have projects of much higher priority, so as a practical matter, such a project isn't likely to become significant enough to get to the top of our agenda any time in the near future.

Even if we collected all this data, I don't see how it would significantly change what we're doing now. We're not going to reject quality games merely because their system requirements are on the high side. I can see a few ways this data could be used to enhance what we're already doing but not in a major way. Keep in mind that when we publish games, we're looking at perhaps a 5-year sales life. I don't think it would matter too much today if Dweep Gold required a Pentium 200 instead of a Pentium 90, even though that would have been significant many years ago. Since we aren't releasing any bleeding edge games, the system requirements should always be reasonable for most players.

I think that comments here about quering your costumer's
hardware/software are quite right.

Steve, wasnt it your idea about getting as much information
as possible about your clients?

wouldnt it be interesting to know if 70% have GFX accelerators?
DirectX > 5 or even 7? how many have win98,2000,ME/XP?

Isnt it wise to try and see who are your end users?
i think its only logical

Sure, lots of things are logical if we have unlimited time and resources. But the good is the enemy of the best. Some may see this as a good use of our time and energy, but it's not among the best. Knowing what exact specs people have today is of limited use to us, especially since each game will typically sell for many years. What someone doesn't have today, they may well have tomorrow. Down the road we may decide this project is important enough to tackle... but not today.

This type of data is perhaps more important if you're going to make all your money in the first 3-6 months, but that isn't our model. Our games will typically see most of their sales occur after the first year.

Both of my two “low-end” computers are kind of close together, I guess. One of my computers has a 100 Mhz processor, 32 Megs of RAM, and a Sound Blaster 16 sound card. :D But, it has a Voodoo2 video card with 12 Megs of video RAM. My laptop has a 450 Mhz processor, though it only has 32 Megs of RAM, and a video card with 4 Megs of RAM, which doesn’t support 3d games too good. Generally, the laptop performs better on 2d games, and the other computer on older 3d games.

Sorry, I don’t have any computers under 32 Megs of RAM, though I could take out a couple of sticks from the 100 Mhz machine. :D I still have a 1 Mb video card in my closet, but I think most gaming computers are out of the stone age, so I don’t think I need to test that far back. When I got my laptop, it was the “bottom of the line”, and that was a couple of years ago, so I’m using it for testing. I got it mainly for typing up notes, and doing other class work (at least, that was my excuse to my parents, who paid for it ;) ).

On what resolution to use, the lower you support, the better. You don’t really need to worry about computers that can’t support 800x600x32, you just have to worry about lag. My 14” monitor made in 1994 can support that, and my 1 Meg EDO RAM video card can support it also (according to the box). My suggestion is have both 640x480 and 800x600 (and higher, if you want) and have it start off at 800x600. The reason I suggest 800x600 is that the “more experienced” gamers with their older machines already know how to set down the resolution. And, the “less experienced” gamers with the newer machines don’t need to set it higher, and you’re game will look better to them. :D The same with bits per pixel. 256 color image files is a good idea; with custom palettes, 256 colors is all you need.

If any of you guys (or gals) need some low end testing, I’ll be happy to help. :cool:


Oh, and I'm one of those losers with a 56k modem also. :D