Is the OpenGL renderer the same thing (or an improvement on) the Glide Wrapper? I was playing Standoff and Secret Ops (a year or so ago or more) on my ancient laptop with the Glide Wrapper installed to get better graphics. Is the OpenGL renderer a cleaner version of the same thing? Or is it something completely different?
I think you indeed confuse the Glide wrapper and OpenGL renderer.
Glide is the name of the set of video instruction used exclusively by the now obsolete 3DFx video cards. The Glide wrapper is some kind of "emulation" layer that let the game think there is a 3DFx video card installed in your computer, then translate every rendering call from Glide to DirectX so your newest card can render things on screen. You could have used a Glide wrapper to run WCP, SO and Unknown Enemy into using a fake 3DFx mode. Standoff doesn't support 3DFx, and I *think* it never did (we removed support for 3DFx pretty early in the game development, but
maybe it was from Episode 2 onward).
The OpenGL renderer is a fan-made replacement dll for WCP and SO. Think of it as a replacement part for the game. There is no emulation involved here; instead of using Glide or DirectX, the game sends his polygons to be rendered to the OpenGL dll who does the data crunch and render things on screen. The OpenGL renderer was originally made for Standoff, while keeping retro-compatibility in mind so
we could release a WCP/SO version later. This is the OpenGL thing now included in that new installer package: an earlier (and stable !
) version of the OpenGL renderer Standoff uses.
Hmm. Size isn't an issue for me (especially since I finished downloading the modded full install package a bit ago
), but I can't help but wonder if the enhancements could be applied to the "barebones" installer.
Or, more importantly, would it be worth the effort?
If you mean "Can we add those enhancements to the classic install ?", then answer is yes... but my aim here was to make things simpler to anyone wanting to play this great game.
Imagine the hassle someone new to WC would have to face when trying to get Secret Ops working... First, download 8 different files. Click to install the main package, and after having unzipped the whole content of it the installer claims you don't have enough disk space and deletes all the extracted files. Alright, say the player is good (and patient) enough to find the trick him[her]self or googleing for the tip. Then the installation proceeds and "ding!" error message: the installer can't find teh Glide dlls ! Of course it's no big deal and we just have to change the video setting in the launcher for DirectX, but how is the player expected to know that ? Then the player launches the game: crash ! We know it's just a matter of adding the Win95 compatibility flag on the EXE, but again the player has to know, or find. After setting the Win95 compatibility flag, start the game: registration screen. Dang. CLick on the "Register" button in the game, the registration website doesn't exist anymore. D'oh ! Again, we old timer know there is a keygen on HCl's website, but can we expect everyone to know ?
In short, I just wanted to make a simple does-it-all installer that'd help more people to (re)discover Secret Ops as a great (and free !) game without any hassle. And to answer the initial question more specificly: there is no way I could just "fix" the original installer to do a good job like this.