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Vectronic: What Now?


reepblue

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Over 2 weeks ago, I released a small demo showcasing my project's core gameplay on the Leadwerks Engine. Although I'm happy with the demo; it's a good landmark for the project, but it can be better visually and functionality. I learned a lot of new information about the engine on how to better optimize it, multiplatform diffrences, and I grew a slight hatred to a certain brand of GPUs. But the demo on the Game Launcher to me was a success.

 

The stand-alone version in my opinion was a bit shakey as with stand-alone releases you lose the end user's ease of use when it comes to settings and the requirement of OpenAL. The Vectronic Demo was indeed targeted to work with the Game Launcher from the begining as I wanted to be more focused on the actual game scripting than the dirty stuff such as how settings are loaded, menus, etc. But I also wanted a stand-alone version out due to the launcher being in beta, and I wanted to let people on linux play it.

 

I took Vectronic to the Portal community to see how they liked it. I mostly got back issues in actually launching the application. Besides the lack of OpenAL, most people did not seem to understand how they can run the Portal 2 (Which runs on a branch of the Source Engine that can run on DX9 cards.), and other games but not Leadwerks; especally on a certain brand of a GPU. One person actually got angry at me because he could not run the game. Overall, it was mostly things that Josh nor I can fix. (i.e it was ether outdated hardware or poor drivers.) However, the OpenAL requirement is something I can look into.

 

Right now, I'm stepping away from the demo, and focusing on improving the stand-alone experience now since the soultions for the standard edition has been recently optimized. With the Summer Games Tournament coming up, it's a good deadline to stay focused, and to experment with non-Vectronic stuff. After this project is done, Vectronic will be back on track as I kind of need this done before I continue to work on my main project.

 

I still got Part 2 of My Introduction Entry to write which I share why and how I moved the Project to Leadwerks, but I think I'll write that when I want to look back as right now I want to looking forward. I might also share various techniques I used in the Vectronic Demo as I think it will help with any user of Leadwerks; especially durning the summer tournament. I'll continue to write about whatever I'm working on here. :)

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Don't get too mad at that brand of gfx manufacturer. They keep their competition and and developers honest. And we wouldn't have Vulkan as we know it without them.

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Don't get too mad at that brand of gfx manufacturer. They keep their competition and and developers honest. And we wouldn't have Vulkan as we know it without them.

 

I'm not really mad, it just makes things harder than they have too...

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Once their driver 15 gets out of beta (it's been in beta for six months now) that problem will go away because Windows will update most peoples' driver automatically.

 

I recommend packaging OpenAL with your installer and automatically running it silently in a post-install step. Inno Setup is a good and free install system that can do this.

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If you want to know bad graphics manufactureres, don't look towards AMD. Look towards Intel. Better yet, look at Intel on Linux. I don't think Intel even has an OpenGL 4.0 driver on Linux. Just OpenGL 3.1

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If you want to know bad graphics manufactureres, don't look towards AMD. Look towards Intel. Better yet, look at Intel on Linux. I don't think Intel even has an OpenGL 4.0 driver on Linux. Just OpenGL 3.1

 

In a perfect world, everyone could just go with their preferences and enjoy games the same way. My linux machine is an AMD processor, with an AMD GPU running Ubuntu 14.04LTS, and it plays Portal 1 at 30fps. And I know if I were to slap a drive running Windows/DirectX, that game will run with no issues. Maybe the 15 driver will fix everything, who knows. At the end of the day, I don't have control over what players want/have in their PCs.

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you probably already know this, but openal can also be silently installed like this:

oalinst.exe /s

 

or maybe you can try copying dll files openal32.dll and wrap_oal.dll locally.?

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Here's how you do it with Inno Setup. Add these lines at the end of the script:

[Run]
Filename: "{app}\oalinst.exe"; Parameters: "/s"; StatusMsg: Installing OpenAL...
Filename: "{app}\vcredist_x86.exe"; Parameters: "/passive /norestart"; StatusMsg: Installing Visual C++ 2013 RunTime...

 

And just make sure you include those installers with it. (I'm not sure if you need the VC redistributable.)

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