Mail Archives: djgpp/1998/07/04/19:30:49
In comp.os.msdos.djgpp, article <199807041652 DOT RAA22306 AT sable DOT ox DOT ac DOT uk>,
George Foot (george DOT foot AT merton DOT oxford DOT ac DOT uk) wrote:
> On 4 Jul 98 at 2:32, Andrew R. Gillett wrote:
>
> > If I autodetect the video driver, is there any way of telling which one
> > has been chosen?
>
> gfx_driver points to the GFX_DRIVER struct for the currently selected
> graphics driver.
Thanks, I will check it out.
> > I want a warning screen which says something along the
> > lines of:
> >
> > 'WARNING: You need VESA 2 graphics to play this game properly'
>
> But that would be a lie -- how do you know they aren't using a driver
> that's better than VESA 2? I think the best way to add this sort of
> warning would be to measure the frame rate and point out to the user
> that what they're seeing is an undesirably low frame rate, and that
> perhaps they should try to use a more suitable driver.
What video driver is better than VESA 2 (other than VBE/AF, perhaps)?
Maybe you're talking about the standard specific card drivers, but I've
found them to be no faster, and often less reliable.
> > (my games are very slow, I am writing a C&C clone in 800x600x16bit, which
> > runs at 3fps...)
>
> Could you not make an option to run the game in a lower colour depth
> with lower quality graphics, or even at a lower resolution? The
> former would be a simple change -- create a reasonable palette and
> set it (and the colour depth) before loading your graphics, and then
> Allegro will adjust the images' colour depths as it loads them.
It is -much- slower in 256 colours because of all the colour conversion
that needs to be done. And now that I've done realtime transparencies in
it, it wouldn't work in 256 colours anyway.
My intention with this game is not to release it for many years. After
all, a C&C game is a massive project, especially for someone like me who
is relatively inexperienced in writing complex software. By the time it
is finished, PCs will be much faster and should be able to run it at a
decent speed ;)
(That's the principle that the whole games industry works on - write it
for the highest system in existence, if not higher, because by the time
it's finished, that system will be standard)
--
Andrew Gillett
http://argnet.fatal-design.com/
ICQ: 12142937
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