Re: Graphic Library and market share

>    We're making some small puzzle game for Win32 to be (hopefully)
> distributed online. We're currently using SDL (as we had planned to make
> it easily portable), but some problems with it are slowing down our
> development (timer granularity and slow alpha blitting mostly).
>    So we're thinking in using DirectX for now, and later care about
> other platforms. I wanted to get some idea about the installed base of
> DirectX. I believe DX8.1 comes with Windows XP, and at least DX6 or DX7
> must come with W2K. We don't care a lot about W98 right now (¿Should
> we?). Our programmers say DX8 will be easier to use tan DX7, but I'm
> worried it will restrict our market share, as we're not targeting
> hardcore gamers (with the latest in machine and OS).

If you're going to use DDraw then you're using DX7 anyway, and it
comes with W2k, AFAIK. However, be careful with this because
there is a whole range of old nVidia drivers with broken DDraw
support that exibit rather severe visual glitches when your backbuffer
is in system memory (which it needs to be for alpha-blending). This
has been an endless source of pain for us.

If I was rewriting our stuff today, I'd ditch any hw-accel altogether
and go with GDI, or *possibly* require 3d hw and go with D3D8.

Regards,
Marin Kovacic
Lemonade Productions
http://www.lemonade-p.com



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