If people buy devices with these shitty chipsets,
they cannot really want to have good OpenGL or good
D3D support or good speeds at all.
Which just emphasises how much the casual games market needs to be
treated differently. Casual games are largely bought by people who don’t
care for Shader Model 3.0 or EAX audio or Razer Diamondback mice,
they’re bought by people who want internet, word processing (and maybe
a spreadsheet program), e-mail and iTunes and nothing else.
Casual games are largely simple in terms of graphics and audio, the
biggest sellers being puzzle games (bejewelled, Mystery Solitaire,
Bookworm) with your usual assortment of breakout clones, $BUSINESS
management games and the occasional old-school adventure/puzzle game.
One of the main advertised games at popcap right now, Dynomite, is a
blatant Bubble Bobble clone.
What’s the point? Getting these popular and lucrative games running on
as many systems as possible. When it’s a game so simple it could easily
run on a computer from the previous decade, hardware acceleration is
neither necessary or desirable as it adds nothing in terms of speed
(when you’re waiting for vSync any gain is just forfeit) but it does
cause compatability problems.
And this is where SDL should have its focus.
Games that take one coder (who knows his way around graphics and audio
editors), not 2 coders, 10 graphic artists, 35 level designers and 50
testers to produce.
Whenever I go to the local game store, all I see is Quake++ and
Comand&Conquer++. Even the low-prised “classics” are starting to become
Quake++ only.
When I say a box of Sim City 4 I foundly remembered all nights I spent
playing the original Sim City instead of studying for exams. I quickly
checked the backside for all new features. When all I could find where
descriptions of all the gazillion ways I could show the city I put it back
on the shelf.
When I had a fatal computer failure last summer, I had to dust of an old
Pentium 200 running Windows 98. Of the 20 games I have bought every one
could run on it, even though I had bought 19 of those games after the
old computer had been replaced.On Fri, 3 Aug 2007, Paul Duffy wrote: