Sorry for the bump, had the tab opened for some days but lost track of it after some time.
I think for a potential OpenPandora publisher like ourselves, we need to make OpenPandora development kits out of BeagleBoard-xM's - for graphics development - at least until OpenPandora hardware becomes more commonly obtainable.
No, just a GLES2 support layer is enough. If you have a modern system with GL4 drivers you most likely have something compatible. Probably even with hardware debug and profiling registers.
If you don't chances are that a wrapper to Desktop GL2 exists which is usually enough. There is even one by PowerVR - and it's also for Windows.
The faster processor will allow for debug versions of code. We'll also need the 512MB RAM as our current run-time footprint is around 380MB. Thanks Ari64, slaeshjag, and TrashyMG.
Why do you even worry about graphics if you have such a large footprint?
As to the perfect workstation, it sounds like it doesn't exist. We'll have to look into VMWare Player with a Ubuntu image, code/compile and send over to the BeagleBoard for graphics testing.
What the fuck.. You can just compile through / for cygwin. It should be all you need for now. Games usually don't depend too much on the OS anyway (usually no GUI, only threading, timing, etc. necessary). So maybe you can (or already have) your own wrapper for the system calls. Running a VM is overkill imho.
A BeagleBoard is not necessary for the reasons I mentioned above. It's only necessary if you need a lot of extensions and the same precision as the Pandoras SGX provides.
However, for a company this is not a wise decision as you want your code to be portable. Hence you wouldn't want to add bit fiddling hacks on the GPU side.
Our hesitation here is that a number of folks reported their 64-bit Windows machines bricked from VMWare's Player.
- No comment -
I know Linux fans would probably tell us to use Linux workstations. But usually any computer with a graphics acceleration card in it has more horsepower than Linux needs and therefor is wasted if it's not running Windows.
Sorry?! Recently those "GPU powered low-cost super computers" have been showing up a lot as projects at Universitys etc. Most of them run Linux because they need fine control over the HW - something which is harder to do with Windows. Your argument is only true when talking about ATI hardware as their driver support for Linux sucks. Furthermore a dual-boot (possibly even from USB) is not hard to set up. Wether it's necessary or not is another point. I still think Cygwin or something similar is by far enough. Porting well-structured code is a matter of minutes anyway.
Randel Reiss
Director Product Development
Prairie Games, Inc.
mailto:RandelR@PrairieGames.com
http://www.MinionsOfMirth.com
There is a feature on the forum called "Signature", start using it.
BTW: If the graphics quality from the video on
http://www.minionsofmirth.com/ is your set goal, you should consider using GLES1 anyway.
Probably adds a lot of platforms to the possible userbase and at the same times simplifies the code. You would depend on the drivers then as most just wrap around GLES2 (or something equivalent), but the shown graphics seem so simple, that even old chips should handle them fine if your renderer isn't a complete mess.
But in any case, the video doesn't give me the impression that anything even has to be optimized. It's neither showing complex scenes, nor complex shading. - There shouldn't be much room for improvement besides the typical optimizations which you'd also do on desktops. So why do you even want a dev system for the port? Just use a GLES 1 / 2 support layer.. Maybe it would already be enough to use a GL to GLES wrapper. It would certainly cut development cost.
