I’m interested in using JME to create a 3D computer version of a popular board game. Legal issues aside, how much, if any, trouble will there be regarding OpenGL 2 support on a non-gamer’s computer? I’d like this project to be accessible to as many people as possible most of who are non-gamers and will have a the cheapest computer, or, perhaps whatever the employee says, from a physical store near their house. Ideally, I could just send the Jar to anyone and then they can run it. Is JME able to accomplish anything close to that? I am trying to decide between using JME 3.1 or just writing a 2D gui in Swing or JavaFX.
EDIT: Also, please cite your sources. When I search on the Internet I find a bunch of random people making wildely varying claims about what non-gamers have with no substantiation.
That’s because it’s impossible to tell… they don’t play games so they’ve never had to check. They don’t show up in Steam stats or similar gaming site stats, etc…
Will there be folks unable to play your game? Absolutely. Will there be tons of folks able to play your game? Certainly.
If you want it to be as accessible as possible then maybe just do it in 2D in regular Swing. It will run everywhere. Or even better, make it a web-based game.
Are there any stats for all windows computers or something like that? I can
tolerate some people being unable to use it, but, I can’t decide if the 3D
graphics are worth that without knowing , at least approximately, how many
people will get left out.
What do developers of non-game 3D software do? I’m thinking of perhaps
architecture software.
You might be looking at this the wrong way. You are making a game yes? ok then you must make certain assumptions. Based on your criteria for these assumptions you then choose the proper technology to ensure that you get the most people possible to meet them. I will give you an example of how I did this for my game.
Assumptions:
People with up to a 10 year old computer should be able to play the game
My target audience is people that have played at least one other game
Players will have a video card that is not older than 10 years old
Based on these 3 basic assumptions I created the game with the old 3.0 version of JMonkey (back then that’s all we had) … but made sure it supported OpenGL1.0. This was over a year and a half ago. I had about 2000 alpha testers and they where all happy. When 3.1a came out, I made the decision to switch to 3.1 and stop OpenGL 1.0 support all together because it REALLY was not worth the effort. My 3.1 game does support OpenGL 2.0 as the minimum requirement now. Out of the 2000 alpha testers, I lost ONE player and his computer was admittedly over 15 years old. A month later he joined our closed beta program because he realized that you can buy a 20 dollar OpenGL 2.0 compatible video card. The moral of the story is … trying to make sure that EVERYONE can play your game will guaranty one of two things … either you will never launch your game because it will take forever to build does to you writing duplicate code for all versions, or you will create a 1980s looking game that nobody will want to play. Rule of thumb is you will never be able to make everyone happy. The best you can shoot for is to make most people happy. As for how architectural software companies do it? Well, they force their users to upgrade their hardware of course. If you spend 5000 dollars on an architectural software package you can afford a 20 dollar video card. Of course this does not work for games
My work laptop (business dell stuff, no extra gpu) can run jme inside a virtualbox machine with 30fps for low end games
So about the level of an smartphone
yeah, actually religion was my first thought, then women, but it didn’t sit right having a go at that.
There are a lot of very smart people that choose to follow a religion, that’s fine, what I’m not to keen on is brainwashed idiots who in blind faith follow moronic ideals and wind up acting like completely retards… if a religion does not allow one to question it, you’re going to have a bad time.
on a side note, this seemingly intelligent lady at work, bit of a bible basher, asked during a recent safety meeting: “in what kind of emergency would we need to break all the windows in the store?” … she was referring to the “In case of emergency, break glass” fire alarm buttons :chimpanzee_facepalm:
