As a producer for RealArcade I get a number of game submissions for games that use OpenGL. Unfortunately, our first experience with this wasn’t a very good one - as it became obvious that over 50% of our user base did not have current OGL drivers for their video cards. Directing folks to glsetup.com didn’t help much either…that install is so full of warnings and disclaimers that most users would cancel the install out of raw fear before completion.
We would like to release games based on OGL, but we’d also like this to be a good user experience and a successful effort.
Does anyone here know who would I talk to about modifying glsetup to be a more user friendly experience?
You have the glsetup home page at http://www.glsetup.com/
The distributed drivers is mostly for all functions of the card so this is not an OpenGL specic problem. Most of the problems reported on the internet seems to be people with old outdated video cards with poor 3D support . If the game authors listed hardware requriments and perhaps also possibly cards that meets them could that avoid a lot of frustation. You can also say that if the card is not on http://www.glsetup.com/ihvs/index.htm can it most likely not be used for 3D gaming.
I think that you should direct people to the companies producing the cards, or the chips that the cards are based on (since reference drivers are sometimes more up to date than those released by the card maker).
As gl_man pointed out, many older card would not have adequate OpenGL support, but are also likely to not have up to date Direct3D support (such as DirectX 8 compatible drivers). The situation is less serious for Direct3D, I would think.
My opinion is that you have about 50% of the user base that CAN play OpenGL games as is, and probably more if they download new driver from the card manufacturer. This is a good start, IMO. The situation should only get better.