Ticket #1419 (assigned defect)
Report nice error messages to Windows users with missing hardware-accelerated OpenGL drivers
| Reported by: | Philip | Owned by: | tehmark |
|---|---|---|---|
| Priority: | Should Have | Milestone: | Backlog |
| Component: | Core engine | Keywords: | simple |
| Cc: |
Description
About 4% of our Windows users (of those who enable feedback) don't have working hardware-accelerated OpenGL drivers installed, which means they get the GDI Generic driver, which is terrible and slow and will cause ugly error messages (about missing multitexture extensions etc) and incorrect rendering. (At least the main menu should start and render mostly correctly without crashing, though.)
I'd guess (based on no evidence) that most people do have adequate graphics hardware, and there's just a problem with their drivers. (You can test this by e.g. renaming nvoglv32.dll (on NVIDIA) - Windows should automatically fall back to the software renderer.)
Since it's so common, we probably ought to detect that case and report a nice error message (perhaps via a dialog box in the in-game GUI, if that's fast enough, and get rid of the ugly assertion failures before that), telling people there's a problem and telling them to install the latest graphics drivers for their machine.
Started work on this - ETA 7 days (conservative estimate, it shouldn't take long at all once I get my head around the source)