[Bf-committers] Windows platform things to do before 2.73

[Martijn Berger]

Hi everyone,

I would like to propose

- actually checking the OpenGL context when starting up blender.
   - fatal error when less then the required OpenGL 1.4 is found.
   - warning when less then OpenGL 2.1 is found (Nvidia  NV30 released in
2003)

     There are some technical issue with giving the fatal error as it might
be best to use an OS dependent dialog box explaining that blender cannot
run on windows at least.
     Mac OS X is unaffected as all versions we support guarantee at least
this capability.

     On windows at least this would make sure the bugs reported by people
using GDI driven OpenGL 1.1 will not happen. Also it would get our users
who still use blender on an pentium 3 with windows XP the ability to adjust
to the fact that it might not always continue to work with the latest and
greatest.

- getting rid of the launcher.
  On windows we have a binary launcher that exists only to set an OPENMP
related environment variable.
  I would like to get rid of this again in favour of setting it in the
short-cut or setting the variable globally during install.
  Also we could and should check for this in the "System Info".


Both of these issues touch on the issue of giving the user feedback about
his or her system configuration / hardware / settings and how they might
negatively impact blenders performance. I would like feedback on how to
handle these.

Martijn