However, quite a few users find it difficult to install drivers, and I would prefer that our games would run immediately for everyone. Also, some laptop manufacturers disallow downloading drivers from the sites of Nvidia/AMD/Intel directly. So I am wondering why this happens exactly, and whether something can be done about it.
Until this week I thought the cause was that Windows Vista/7/8 automatically installs new drivers, but installs incomplete drivers and leaves out OpenGL. That would mean an evil scheme by Microsoft to destroy OpenGL on Windows, by not installing it properly, thus giving problems to all OpenGL games.
However, today I installed GLview and on my computer this tool only reports GDI Generic and does not recognise my ATI card, while our own game Awesomenauts recognises it just fine. This makes me wonder: for those users who get GDI Generic in Awesomenauts, is OpenGL maybe secretly properly installed but not selected by SDL for some reason?
So is there some evil Microsoft plot, or am I just initialising SDL/OpenGL incorrectly?
This is how I initialise OpenGL+SDL:
SDL_GL_SetAttribute(SDL_GL_DOUBLEBUFFER, 1);
SDL_GL_SetAttribute(SDL_GL_ALPHA_SIZE, 8);
SDL_VERSION(&windowInfo.version);
SDL_GetWMInfo(&windowInfo);
screen = SDL_SetVideoMode(xRes, yRes, 32, SDL_OPENGL | SDL_FULLSCREEN);
Also, is it correct that unlike DirectX, it is not possible for a game to install OpenGL, so OpenGL can only be installed with the drivers?
Sidequestion: are any of the big games still OpenGL these days, or is Rage the only AAA OpenGL left?