Hi
Lots of work lately...
Well, it should run
What graphic card are you using, and what OS? If you're using windows, i'm not sure the packager made an static binary or a dynamic one, with all the necessary dll's (fftw3, libSDL, libSDL_image, etc...).
99.9% of the problems reported are related to ATI and Intel cards.
ATI problems because aparently they have a bug (this applies to OSX ATI drivers as well - the OSX maintainer was trying a build and couldn't solve this, and after posting at apple's opengl/developers mailing list, it was confirmed that ATI drivers have a problem with GLSL syntax).
On windows, there was a problem as well. Altough the GLSL shaders were (and are) 100% correct, and GLSL validation tools reported a 100% correct syntax (GLSLvalidate from 3dlabs, Apple's GLSL validation tool), the shaders just fail to compile.
The solution to this problem is, if you can start dftd, at least to get to the main menu, to disable GLSL shaders and HQSFX in Options>Misc.
If you can't, you should have a configuration file, i'm not sure where this is placed in Windows, perhaps one of the windows users can help? Documents & Settings/Username/dangerdeep ?
If you find that file, it's a text file, you can just replace use_shaders = "yes" to "no", same for water_shaders, and hqsfx (periscope blur effects, some other graphics details).
The other problems are ATI not supporting some older cards, and the game requires at least OpenGL 2.0 to run. Newer generations have OpenGL 2.1 support, on Apple they have OpenGL 2.0 iirc, but still, ATI is a neverending source of problems.
As for intel onboard graphics. I don't think they support OpenGL 1.5. The minimum requirement to run dangerdeep with fixed pipeline, is OpenGL 1.5. To run it with GLSL shaders, it's OpenGL 2.0.
So, you can try to check your driver information to see if the OpenGL version matches. As we all use nvidia, atm it's what's 100% foolproof - it's a voluntary project, done in our spare time, and we just can't support everything. If some C/C++ developer with OpenGL knowledge, and an ATI and/or Intel card, wants to check it out and try and see what's wrong, we would apretiate it.
I hope this helped. You can check out our forums at dangerdeep.net as well, perhaps you can find some help there, there were a couple of threads related to ATI as well.
Since i'm here, just an information > work is underway in the new physics, new boyancy is implemented, altough it still needs work for uboats (to be able to control ballasts and trim tanks, flood tanks, blow tanks, etc... as well as a screen/station for this). Work is underway in the soldbuch screen, which is the initial part of the career mode, some work done also to support insignias, uboat and flotilla.
And new models, J, K, L and O class destroyers, as well as 2 new CAM ships, HMS Empire Faith and HMS Empire Lawrence (totally unrelated to the CAM ship based on the North Sands class we have). Work is finished to support per-uboat type bridge models & camera settings, so things are moving, slowly, but moving
That's it, stay tuned.