Opinions on games dropping Windows XP support.

[Lyx]

2 and 3 your car still uses the same gearbox design but it's far beyond being the orginal car, it still has 4 wheels is it still not an entirly new car

is a new V12 going to fit in that

Prince of Persia 3D from 1999 was made in the same engine as fallout 3, will your computer from 1999 run fallout 3, i don't think a 233Mhz Pentium is going to cut it

Both are false analogies. We're not talking about a new "frame", and we aren't talking about energy requirements. And besides, all this has nothing to do with what happened for DX10 (and thus is irrelevant to the topic). Non-XP DX10 plain and simply is a market-strategy decision - it has little to do with tech.

 

[RanD00M]

. Windows 7 costs $100, and if you are a student much less (at my school free)

It's $4-500 here in Iceland. I am a student but my school doesn't provide student discounts. And it isn't handing it out to students.

 

[Polyg0n]

Windows XP is already 10 years old! That is pretty old when it comes to the world of technology so I think it is about time to move on. And I'm running an Windows 7 so it doesn't really matter to me.

 

[R3dF41c0n]

Windows XP is an old operating system, c'mon it doesn't even recognize more than 3.6GB of RAM (unless you have XP 64bit) and it doesn't support anything higher than DX9.

I remember this same argument back when XP first came out. People said the same things and vowed to cling to Windows 98 until the code broke apart.

Besides, even if major developers stop supporting XP indie develops will keep supporting it for another 5 years or so.

tl:dr Windows XP is old, by the time developers stop supporting it you will most likely have 7.

 

[jamesworkshop]

2 and 3 your car still uses the same gearbox design but it's far beyond being the orginal car, it still has 4 wheels is it still not an entirly new car

is a new V12 going to fit in that

Prince of Persia 3D from 1999 was made in the same engine as fallout 3, will your computer from 1999 run fallout 3, i don't think a 233Mhz Pentium is going to cut it

Both are false analogies. We're not talking about a new "frame", and we aren't talking about energy requirements. And besides, all this has nothing to do with what happened for DX10 (and thus is irrelevant to the topic). Non-XP DX10 plain and simply is a market-strategy decision - it has little to do with tech.

Dx 10 is new code, the driver kernel is new code, it's much like the idea behind having the same broom even after the orginal handle has broken and you have got a new handle

Despite all claims no one has produced a hotfix or anything else to allow versions of dx higher then 9.0c to run under XP, in fact anyone capable of doing that should also be able to retrofit it into windows 2000 since they both support dx 9.0c

Intel's 8086 CPU uses the same x86 instruction set the i7 uses but the 8086 does not have the same SSE4 multimedia extensions

 

[Lyx]

@Lyx:
Linux is one OS?
Theoretically yes, but practically no. Take a look at this... [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a0/GNU-Linux_distro_timeline_10_3.png]
Linux is like Pizza. Different flavours...(Debian, SlackWare, RedHat)...chopped into small parts (Knoppix, Ubuntu,...)...and even the same pieces of the same flavour are available in different boxes (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu). I just took that image from wikipedia from above as small example. Look at 2010 on that image...pretty many different Linuxes for being "one OS" as you said.

One OS, different configurations and packagemanagers. The OS is not what you see on the screen - what you see is just a frontend that can be changed like a seperate module, without requiring changes to the "OS". See, i can create an XP, that has a different window-manager, and comes with apps like "autoruns" in the startmenu - does that make it a new/different OS? Nope.

 

[Samwise137]

It's only logical. Microsoft has dropped support for XP so it only follows that games would do the same. My only complaint is that Win7 doesn't support some older games that I still want to play forcing me to keep an otherwise archaic OS on my laptop if I want to play Shadows of the Empire.

 

[spinFX]

Yeah Win7 is basically XP with some of the good features from Vista. Not a hard changeover at all. In fact you can get a few registry edits that make it even more like XP.

Well, thats simply wrong. Vista and Seven are similar to each other, while XP can't compare to any them. For Vista they modified Windows very much, and for Seven they just tweaked it a bit more. You can see how similar they are when you look at most drivers. They are available as download for "XP" or as download for "Vista/7".

I skipped straight from XP to Windows 7. I spent about an hour grabbing little mods to change it so it looks like XP. It really isn't hard and I can tell you that only by looking at the start menu will you see it's Windows 7 and not XP. I <3 Win7

 

[Lyx]

One OS, different configurations and packagemanagers. The OS is not what you see on the screen - what you see is just a frontend that can be changed like a seperate module, without requiring changes to the "OS". See, i can create an XP, that has a different window-manager, and comes with apps like "autoruns" in the startmenu - does that make it a new/different OS? Nope.

Thats why I said that it's theoretically one OS. Do you really think the normal user cares about what you said? Nope. For them they are different OS's.

You lost sight of the topic: There may be different flavours of linux, but all of them can run the same applications. Windows cannot - and the only halfway-reasonable argument for that which has been brought up, is a different driver-model. In other words: The main reason why you need Win7, is because of a few megabytes of changed code, which supposedly justifies replacing everything. In linux or OSX you'd just install a patch, and are good to go - on windows, you need to replace everything.

 

[smeghead25]

How am I going to run games in compatibility mode when they start screwing up? :O

I'M DOOMED I TELL YE!

 

[Delusibeta]

It's a bit sad since it's the most used operating system according to Steam, but come on.

Correction: was. 64-bit Windows 7 has formally overtaken XP.

The thing is that if there is freedom to install PC games, there is freedom to install community patches (or DOSbox or ScummVM). If the classic game is any good, there will be at the very least a comprehensive guide to running it on the latest versions of OSes.

PS: Lyx'a argument is flawed, because different versions of what he calls the "same OS" will inevitably not run everything designed for other versions of said OS. (Try running something that was written for Ubuntu v.1 on Ubuntu v.10, for example). Patches break stuff, especially large amounts of patches over the long term and thus it's inevitable that things designed for one operating system will probably break on later versions (e.g. 64-bit OSes' incompatibilities with some 32-bit or 16-bit programs).

(At the very least, flame Apple equally, they're just as bad in selling small upgrades)

 

[Plinglebob]

and an old kids game called Museum Madness.

Off topic, I had that and thought it was great!

OT: Dropping XP support was going to happen eventually considering it can't run DX10 and I'm on the side of just save up and upgrade. If you're worried about not being able to play your old games, duel booting is easy enough to set (though easiest if you buy an additional small, cheap internal drive).

 

[veloper]

If a game can run well with 2 GB RAM or less, and uses only 1 core for rendering, then it should support winXP in dx9c mode.

If not, then it's naturally win7 64bit and vista only.

 

[Aurora219]

I think it's idiotic from a financial standpoint. We'll all upgrade one day, but while it's still massively in the majority as most popular OS, it makes no sense to remove support.

Hell, it's basically a few more hours coding (no idea how many; I'm not a coder) for a 75% increase in your sales market.

Ethically, they can do what they want. If you don't care when it has no mac support, why should we complain about no XP support?

ok i will argue those numbers, its a lot more than " a few hours" for a start because not only does each individual game have to include really low scalability options, device manufacturers have to keep patching hardware for an OS that is generally on the way out.

Aside from that 75% increase in your sales market, your assumption is only 25% of people have 7/vista for the sake of argument im going to keep it to the western world because thats the only part of the world i have knowledge about. Its a lot of manhours and work to put in, and not just for that release, any patches, multiplayer expansions require that bit extra work all because people are being stubborn about change, anybody i know who has sat down and used 7 for a real amount of time has said that its much better, and thats because it is.

Might want to check your maths there. It's percentages, not multiples. If 55% of the market has XP (A GUESS! You don't have to analyze me!) and 25% have Vista/7 then to open up XP as well is a 110%ish increase.

Secondly, I'm guessing. Taking my guesses and working it out is a waste of your time.

 

[DeaconSawyer]

Honestly I still think XP is the only decent windows release other than 3.1. I still use XP but I could probably manage to run a 7 release. As long as you can mod it as easily as xp I'd be fine. I'd hate to have to bend over backward just to change the system stuff.