Cas of PuppyGames is generous in sharing with other indie developers some of the useful stats he has collected. Today, he has posted the number of installations of different OpenGL versions across Linux, Mac OS X and Windows, taken from users of his games over the past seven months. Obviously, the games Cas puts out aren’t exactly hardcore, but neither are they exclusively soccer mom fare. So what to make of these numbers depends upon the composition of his user base.
Other things to consider are that his games are all in Java — does that make his users more or less likely to have updated drivers or does it have no impact at all? The stats also say nothing about available extensions, which in many cases could effectively bump a version up. So while these numbers have no definitive meaning to anyone but Cas, they can still provide a general guideline for those grappling with the question of which versions of OpenGL to support. OpenGL 1.1 will always be the safest bet, of course, but it could be more trouble than it’s worth if you aren’t particularly targeting the casual market.
Technorati Tags: game development, game programming, OpenGL, indie games
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