OpenGL in windows

#1 Not planning it.

#2 It would be mostly useless. Driver support for anything beyond the OpenGL 1.1 specification isn't as consistent as Direct3D, and can be outright bad outside the Nvidia and ATI cards. Just "porting back" from OSX wouldn't do it: OpenGL is far more consistent and reliable in OSX.

#3 But if you implement a custom shader or a customization in graphics , it will work on both platforms since today the only graphics adapters that works is AMD and NVIDIA.

#4 When Torque was under the previous ownership there was some talk of adding some OpenGL support for Windows. This would not be aimed at production use, the primary benefit would be to make it possible to develop and test shaders for both OpenGL and Direct3D on the same development machine. I wouldn't hold my breath on that happening any time soon, though.

Direct3D is so far ahead of OpenGL on Windows at this point that it would be a very bad idea to release OpenGL games on Windows.

As an example of why it would be bad... my shiny new $400 graphics card takes about 40 seconds just to initialize OpenGL. If I downloaded a trial of your game, I would probably kill the process after about 20 seconds and delete it from my machine.

#5 Sounds like your $400 graphics card needs a driver update from the manufacturer. If you are using the included drivers in vista/win7 they emulate opengl with directX and are a lot slower. There is no reason Opengl should take anymore than a few seconds if even that to init over directX.

#6 @Tim... come on now, I think I know to update my drivers. 280.26 for the record. Obviously OpenGL "shouldn't" take more than a second to initialize, even with stock Windows drivers, but it does. It's a problem with one of the DLLs that are being loaded that goes into a loop loading a bunch of other DLLs over and over. It's probably something that can be fixed, but this is on a fresh Windows install with a fresh driver update.

While somebody may be willing to go through the trouble of troubleshooting and playing with drivers and DLLs on their machine to play Battlefield 3, they're probably not going to do so for your indie game.

Windows OpenGL drivers just don't get the same kind of love and QA that the Direct3D drivers do, because most of the gaming industry has given up on OpenGL on Windows a long time ago. They've given up on OpenGL on Windows because Microsoft has given up on OpenGL on Windows, and without real OS-level support, OpenGL can never hope to compete with Direct3D.

I've got 6 different Windows machines here with a variety of nVidia and ATI/AMD graphics cards, and they all have SOME issue with OpenGL, ranging from subtle to deal-breaker. That's not a very good ratio ;)