I'm a linux programmer by nature (although with windows programming experience from a few years back in the games industry). I've recently ported my lispy games/livecoding engine[1] to win2k using mingw - I just wondered if this means the executable should work unchanged on XP and Vista - particularly as it makes heavy use of OpenGL, I remember some controversy about the compatibility of OpenGL on Vista... Any help much appreciated
People were pissing and moaning thaT ogl ran on top of DX in vista and that it might slow things down a little. My assumption was that it assured better compatibility with vista but not sure how true that is.
It's not quite true. The default vista OGL runs on top of DX, but it is still possible to install card specific drivers.
In my business (cad) we saw crap GL performance in the betas, but as it stands the performance is OK so long as you aren't using a comedy graphics card with non existent OpenGL drivers.
We do still hit compatibility issues, but most of them are nothing to do with OpenGL.
GoatFoam wrote:the performance is OK so long as you aren't using a comedy graphics card with non existent OpenGL drivers.
You mean an NVIDIA card, right? Specifically the ones with multi-coloured duct covers, LEDs and "289000 XL-HD-DVI XTreme PCI-e" type waffle in their names?
Thanks for the information! Sounds like OpenGL is going to be ok - what about binaries, if I build a win32 executable on win2k, should it work ok in Vista and XP?
nebogeo wrote:Thanks for the information! Sounds like OpenGL is going to be ok - what about binaries, if I build a win32 executable on win2k, should it work ok in Vista and XP?
I can't think of any reason it wouldn't to be honest... well apart from UAC of course. you might want to read up on that. basically it involves not doing silly things like save to c:\program files\myapp\ and saving into the users folder instead, but being a linux coder I'm guessing you're familiar with all of that.
whilst we're on the subject not hardcoding 'program files' and 'my documents' is also a good idea. I didn't realise until i moved how much of a bad idea that was
nebogeo wrote:Thanks for the information! Sounds like OpenGL is going to be ok - what about binaries, if I build a win32 executable on win2k, should it work ok in Vista and XP?
You really are a Linux coder aren't you?
Looking forward to fluxus on Windows though. I never could get it building under mingw.
