wrote:Modifying games in ways that alienate the core customers for those games (Windows users) in order to satisfy the tiny base of Linux users who want to play games is shooting oneself in the foot.
OpenGL works fine under Windows, hardly alienating there.
Minority or not, there is a market for Linux games. That's the point of digital distribution, you can reach to these markets.
I remember some netbooks coming with Linux. The linux fans celebrated, the customers returned the machines because they couldn't do anything with their machines.
wrote:Yet when I go to run Plants vs. Zombies, which is a 2D game and only four years old, the framerate sucks and the graphics don't scale nicely, resulting in a heavily aliased, jerky mess that's not fun to play. x_x;
I made a thread about this a long time ago. For some daft reason the Popcap framework still uses DX7. Just set your desktop resolution to something with a 4:3 aspect ratio (like 1024x768) before starting the game and it should scale properly. Spread the word!
wrote:Linux gaming failed once already. I can remember a brief period of time when you could buy boxed copies of games for Linux in software stores but it didn't last long. Within a few months none of the retailers would carry them anymore because they weren't selling.
Loki Software was principally behind those. Some would blame colossal mismanagement for their failure, though no doubt the limited market had much to do with it as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loki_Software
wrote:No multitexturing support (Q2 as well) so hardly "perfect"...
I reckon that I don't know too much about Graphic APIs, but I don't think that in case of the Quake engine not having such an extension would affect performance on new Graphics cards, since the engine is cpu dependant nowadays. I don't think neither that IQ would be worse, textures and lightmaps would just have to be done on two passes now?
GLQuake and Quake2 did support multitexturing and the particular extension it used was regressed as early as the Geforce2.
wrote:Everything made with OpenGL: Still Works Fine
Come to think of it, I seem to recall there are some games such as Anachronox (a Quake 2 game) that only work properly if you purposefully disable certain OpenGL extensions in the video drivers.
Performance-wise it's irrelevant in practice with today's hardware as you said. Probably no visual differences either. It's just a fact that modern cards can't do this feature in those games. I think they are constantly omitting old extensions so it may be only a matter of time until these games are broken. I have minor GL bugs even on newer applications.
wrote:Performance-wise it's irrelevant in practice with today's hardware as you said. Probably no visual differences either. It's just a fact that modern cards can't do this feature in those games. I think they are constantly omitting old extensions so it may be only a matter of time until these games are broken. I have minor GL bugs even on newer applications.
Now that's a good point, who knows how much time our cards will remain to support critical features needed for running early games. 😒
Not forever, that's for sure. If someone actually bothers to exploit old games commercially they usually fix them so they will work on a current computer. Even less incentive for MS/Nvidia/AMD to care if original releases will run. This is why I like console gaming 😀
wrote:wrote:Performance-wise it's irrelevant in practice with today's hardware as you said. Probably no visual differences either. It's just a fact that modern cards can't do this feature in those games. I think they are constantly omitting old extensions so it may be only a matter of time until these games are broken. I have minor GL bugs even on newer applications.
Now that's a good point, who knows how much time our cards will remain to support critical features needed for running early games. 😒
And this is one reason why digital downloads suck. They will mod the games so they work with current hardware and people who were running the games on vintage hardware won't be able to play anymore because they will be automatically updated against their will and have to use a newer machine because their original hardware won't be compatible anymore. Games that ran fine with a DX7 or DX8 video card will be updated to DX10 or DX11 and the same with OGL. You'll need a card that supports a later version of OGL than what you have been using for years.
wrote:And this is one reason why digital downloads suck. They will mod the games so they work with current hardware and people who were running the games on vintage hardware won't be able to play anymore because they will be automatically updated against their will and have to use a newer machine because their original hardware won't be compatible anymore. Games that ran fine with a DX7 or DX8 video card will be updated to DX10 or DX11 and the same with OGL. You'll need a card that supports a later version of OGL than what you have been using for years.
This seems like a very unlikely scenario. The overwhelmingly vast majority of developers are much more likely to stop officially supporting their games rather than mod them to work on current hardware.
I know it's happened occasionally in the past, such as the recent thing with Half-Life on Steam, but very, very few games have anything remotely near the staying power of Half-Life.
Apperently the GL_SGIS_MULTITEXTURE extension still resides on the newer one called GL_ARB_MULTITEXTURE. Maybe the thing is that games are still looking for the old one, and so they consider it as a feature not supported by hardware?
Hmm, did a quick check in the Q2 demo. GL_SGIS_multitexture is listed as not found. In the release notes it says:
3.21
Support for GL_ARB_multitexture added. This supports the new multitexture extensions and deprecates GL_SGIS_multitexture.
The demo is 3.14. 3.21 is source code only so no way of getting this into the original game.
wrote:You says that like dropping support for older cards is some kind of frivolous snap decision. […]
wrote:wrote:Because they didn't bother re-writing the render paths for those old cards when they ported Source to Linux?
Why shouldn't they? Linux adoption would likely go up if they did a better job of supporting older GPUs. In most other ways Linux tends to run well on older hardware, but it just seems that GPU support is its Achilles heel.
You says that like dropping support for older cards is some kind of frivolous snap decision.
Part of getting in to the Steam-on-Linux betas was submitting your hardware profile.
The decision to only support down to a certain level of OpenGL hardware support would have been based on those numbers.
Yeah, but more people probably would've signed up for the Linux Steam betas if Linux support for older graphics cards weren't so dismal in the first place. It's not just an issue with Steam or the Source Engine, it's a problem with GPU support on Linux in general. The drivers available for it are so slow that you need to have a high end graphics card just to run older games.
wrote:And who says OpenGL 1.x (widely, WIDELY used) isn't rotting away? The SGIS Extensions being dropped were only the beginning...
I just watch a recording of a recent key note with valve developers talking about open GL and how they got dx 10 and 11 functionality with it on windows xp among other things.
wrote:wrote:And who says OpenGL 1.x (widely, WIDELY used) isn't rotting away? The SGIS Extensions being dropped were only the beginning...
I just watch a recording of a recent key note with valve developers talking about open GL and how they got dx 10 and 11 functionality with it on windows xp among other things.
I would like to see that after years of MS saying that DX10 is only possible on Vista or later. I always figured it would only be a matter of time before someone actually found a way to make it work with XP. Now if someone would only release a legit file that does it instead of all the virus/trojan garbage files floating around that CLAIM to do it.
Rage is basically a D3D 10 level game. OpenGL 3.x.
D3D10 is too NT6 oriented. Aspects like requiring WDDM.
wrote:Rage is basically a D3D 10 level game. OpenGL 3.x.
D3D10 is too NT6 oriented. Aspects like requiring WDDM.
Well how else can you try to force users into purchasing a new OS without forcing things like this.
From a marketing standpoint it makes perfect sense to build your next DirectX versions into the GPU driver model.
Sucks in many ways as XP was and still is a viable OS but you can't seel many new copies of Win 7/8 if you are still supporting and working on XP.
No matter where you go, there you are...
wrote:Hmm, did a quick check in the Q2 demo. GL_SGIS_multitexture is listed as not found. In the release notes it says:
3.21
Support for GL_ARB_multitexture added. This supports the new multitexture extensions and deprecates GL_SGIS_multitexture.The demo is 3.14. 3.21 is source code only so no way of getting this into the original game.
Looks like my message was a bit confusing, heh. What I tried to say was that after all, perhaps SGIS_MULTITEXTURE functions actually reside being supported (at least to a degree) under actual hardware, but under the hood of the newer extension; GL_ARB_MULTITEXTURE 😜
Because making use of it must need rewriting parts of the source code, and that back in the day such extension didn't exist, that games are looking for the legacy SGIS one, and so what actually has to be (in the worst case)a partially supported hardware feature, is not treated as such by the game engine.
Just trying to share my point of view, 😵
wrote:wrote:I just watch a recording of a recent key note with valve developers talking about open GL and how they got dx 10 and 11 functionality with it on windows xp among other things.
I would like to see that after years of MS saying that DX10 is only possible on Vista or later. I always figured it would only be a matter of time before someone actually found a way to make it work with XP. Now if someone would only release a legit file that does it instead of all the virus/trojan garbage files floating around that CLAIM to do it.
Not support of the DX10 API, support of DX10/DX11 features like more advanced shaders using OpenGL API. I have also heard of this. Unfortunately there are not that many modern OpenGL games.
Looked for a source and found this: http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=36733
