RE: [GD-Windows] Omega Drivers? (shudder)

[Tom H. <to...@ve...>]

At 03:22 PM 6/16/2003, you wrote:
>Would you say that if your customer support spent their evenings
>fielding support calls related to this issue? It's apparently the
>l33t in thing to do among all the top gamers these days.

I originally wrote a long tirade about how I hate that segment of the gamer 
community .. but decided it wasn't worth it ;)

>I wouldn't install these. You wouldn't. But alienating people who
>don't know as well as you or me doesn't feel like great business
>to me.

There's limits to how far you have to go to deal with this kind of stuff, 
and I'd certainly treat it on a case by case basis.

But really .. there's already enough driver specific issues out there that 
things like this just make things a living hell for the developer. Sadly, 
this has been going on for ages and will continue to happen.

>  Thus, I'm looking for a better solution. Extreme end: help
>the guy fix his drivers so they don't break our app ;-) Hopefully
>we won't have to do that.

Just let him know that things are screwed up. Maybe send him a copy of your 
game (demo?) for testing.

>Doing that on the phone, with a high loaded cost per call, is not
>ideal.

Agreed.

>I'd be happy with an automated way of detecting that this problem
>has happened, and re-directing to a web site, and prevent
>installation of the product until the problem is fixed. We already
>do that for other un-supported configurations, such as Voodoo3
>cards, and we're getting pretty good at managing that.

You could look for specific CRCs of the installed drivers, or compare file 
modification dates with known version numbers for the drivers.

You should probably contact the Omega guy and see what (if any) info he can 
provide to find out how to detect that his modified drivers are running, 
and what versions are in use. If they really appear as NVIDIA drivers, then 
I'm surprised that NVIDIA is going after him with both legal barrels 
blaring. Maybe if he isn't doing anything like this now, you can convince 
him to do it in the future.

Also ... I'd spend a great deal of time trying to educate the public 
through your own web site, and places like Voodoo Extreme, Blues News, etc 
about the hazards of installing these kinds of drivers. Not only to try to 
keep the end users from installing them, but also to explain the pain it 
puts developers through trying to deal with the support headaches the 
crappy things end up causing. I suspect you could probably get the various 
sites to run an article or two about it. The hope would be that the number 
of people that make these things might be reduced.

Tom