Re: GL extensions

["Keith Lucas" <klucas@atlan-tech.com>]

>I was talking to some guys a while back about a game they were working on, >and
>one of them said that they won't do a linux port because linux has bad opengl
>support. After some questions, I found out that he meant it didn't have
>certain
>extensions that he likes (mostly concerning multi-texturing, I think). Is >this
>stopping gamehouse developers from working on linux ports? How is linux with
>extensions? I haven't even looked at them... is that something we'll have to
>wait for drivers to mature before it gets tackled?

That would be a "erm, we need an excuse" reason.

Windows, of course, has fantastic OpenGL support, each card having several
iterations of drivers for it. Almost half the drivers have no obvious bugs and
some of them are even quick.

I'd rather have the BASE openGL working at some consistent speed before people
start panicking about multi-texturing extensions.

There is a reason Quake doesn't go near that stuff and basically does it all by
hand: because on one card it'll take orders of magnitude more time to do
something than on another. The behaviour is unpredictable. Quake uses a very
small set of OpenGL activities and they documented exactly what so people could
optimise the drivers. Of course, ID could be /wrong/... in fact they must be,
because they support Linux.

I'd rather think that people have gone: "oh.. our code isn't portable... erm..
was it supposed to be? We can't say it isn't.. erm... Linux doesn't work. Yeah,
that's it."

I've seen that happen in commercial environments, I don't see why it wouldn't
happen in games development.