The horror that is PC development

Swords & Soldiers is now out on PC and Mac on Steam! Buy it from SwordsAndSoldiers.com and use the coupon-code "sinterklaas" before December 5th to get a 30% discount!

In the past two years I have released my first games as a programmer on the Playstation 3 and Nintendo Wii. As I was told beforehand, the most evil part of console development are the certification requirements. Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft have long lists with hundreds of demands that you must meet in order to be allowed to release your game on their platform. These are all purely technical and are about topics like: "Pause the game if the controller runs out of batteries", or: "Show this message when the harddisc is corrupted."

Going through those lists and implementing all of it is incredibly boring work and has little to do with making cool games. However, last week I learned that PC development is actually a lot worse! On consoles, at least all of the requirements make sense, and since you know exactly on what hardware your game will run (all Playstation 3s are essentially the same), it is quite easy to test for. How unlike PC development...

Last week we launched Swords & Soldiers on the PC and the amount of things that can go wrong on all these different combinations of videocards, drivers, Windows versions and user settings is just terrible. Knowing the hardware on consoles suddenly makes them seem incredibly simple to develop for!



The main culprit on PC is the videocard, so I figured it would be interesting to have a little look at the kind of issues we came across during development of various games.

One thing most graphics programmers know, is that you should use power of two (PoT) textures, so resolutions should be like 128, 256, 512, 1024 and 2048. However, this is only relevant for pretty old videocards, since all modern videocards can handle other resolutions as well. Because of our animation system, we often have to round values up, so an animation sheet of 600*512 pixels becomes 1024*512 pixels. That is a huge waste! So to save a lot of space, we don't use power of two textures in HD. Since older computers also need to run Swords & Soldiers, we added a low-res SD mode where all textures are power of two.

Now I would like to detect whether the videocard can run in HD, and then hide that setting if the videocard cannot handle non power of two textures. But how do we detect that? There are some OpenGL extensions related to it, so I tried checking for those. However, some videocards don't have these extensions, yet they can run in HD anyway. I wasn't able to find a definite way to detect this (although I guess greater minds will know one), so I ended up allowing everyone to select HD and showing a message that tells the user to play in SD if the game looks broken otherwise. Pretty lame, but at least it is a clear solution!



A weird issue I came accross while working on Proun, is that certain really old onboard Intel videocards cannot handle objects with more than 65536 vertices. This only happens on some very specific old Intel cards and is okay anywhere else. Since Proun is a hobby project and splitting meshes for this would be quite some work, I ended up not fixing this one.

One of the simpler hardware differences to work with is shader versions. Vertex and pixel shaders can have all kinds of features, depending on the videocard and the DirectX version. However, programming for these isn't that difficult, because shader versions are always backwards compatible. So if for example you would write a shader for version 2.0, then it will definitely also run on 2.x, 3.0 and 4.0. There are no weird combinations here!



However, there are those videocards who think it is okay to lie. While developing De Blob, I learned that there are videocards that claim to be able to do shader 2.0, while they really don't. So I asked that videocard, "Can you do shader 2.0?" and the videocard said: "Yeah, sure, no problem!" I then tried to load the shader, and the videocard simply refused. How is one to program for that kind of weirdness?



The final example I would like to discuss here is one that I am a bit ashamed of, because Swords & Soldiers actually launched with this issue and I had to release a patch on Steam yesterday to fix it. Swords & Soldiers has a dynamic font rendering system, which means that we only load those characters that the game actually uses into video memory. This way we can handle the enormous number of characters needed for languages like Japanese and Chinese. Now we only implemented this after we did extensive tests on all kinds of videocards and we totally forgot to test again, so it turned out about 1% of users could not see any texts in the game at all. Pretty lame.

I haven't been able to figure out why this happened on those videocards, but I do know that the OpenGL function glTexSubImage2D was the cause. So in yesterday's patch I built a workaround that doesn't use that function. For more technical details on this problem, have a look here.

So, I conclude that PC development is actually more difficult than console development!

If you have any fun or interesting examples of rare hardware/driver/OS differences that break games, then please share them by commenting beneath this post. I'd love to hear about your experiences! ^-^