Will PA Run on Windows XP?

Oh and you can't move the button itself around the taskbar? Yeah.. That's irritating. And on multiple monitors you can't move the start button to your not-main display and have programs open in your main display automatically (for example I can't get some .exes to move from my main display to my non-main display, but I haven't given it a dedicated go)


Oh right, I was talking about Windows 8 lol. When I tried Windows 8 I never found the start corner. I'm on 8.1 now. I'm happy with it to be honest.
I hate apps. Like, multitasking with skype - you don't see message notificiations unless you have the app open. It's fine if you're multi-monitor, but most of the time I'm not.

Two things:
One. I have windows 8.1. I can say I dislike it. Yes the start button is an improvement over Windows 8, but windows 7's start menu is just so much better. Apps? I have never used them (other then looking), and have absolutely no inclination to start using them. I have a calculator that works fine, I dont need a fullscreen one. I have a webbrowser that works fine, I dont want a crappy limited IE. There are a few improvements, such as task manager and copying files. But the UI side of things is just frustrating to use compared to XP.

Two. There is no reason not to support XP. I am not saying you should, it is really old and I stopped using it 6 or 7 years ago. But from a programming point of view its not really any harder then programming for vista+. Visual studio 2012/2013 supports xp development just as much as later versions. The game uses OpenGL (apparently), which works just as fine on xp as it does on vista and above. I can see not supporting xp if you were using dx11, because xp itself doesn't support dx11. But when using opengl and all the technology that I can think of works on xp, I dont think it would take much/any effort to get it working.
In my mind, it would be a compile, run, cool. It works. Especially since PA is already cross platform, so they can't rely on os specific features too much.

Agreed, although XP is frustrating to use compared to 7. No Ctrl+Shift+N for new folder, no aero snap, limited taskbar, no libraries and more.

It generally comes down to dependencies (this is what is preventing PA from running on XP), and there's more than just dx11 which is not supported. Making a game "support" an older OS has additional costs too, as you now have to ensure (ie test) the game on that OS and make sure it runs. For a decade old OS with a shrinking user base, on that reason alone many companies are not going to be claiming support for XP.

First reason to drop XP it's fact that 99% of XP users is 32-bit. This game works on out of box 32-bit system really really bad due to 2GB process limit. Even with PAE enabled it's still limited in RAM usage and will crash with out of RAM all the time.

Second reason it's fact that most of XP users have pretty old hardware and as result game will work really bad for them.

Yes, OpenGL is work on XP, but it's depends on vendor drivers support. When XP will be abandoned by Microsoft other verndors like AMD/Nvidia will abandon it too, e.g Intel already abandon both XP and Vista.

So last and most important reason it's post release support of game. E.g when system will be anandoned it's will be pretty hard to support game on it in future. It's mean devs may have to drop this OS support in future anyway which is worse than not have this support from start.

All OS are pretty different, but general barebone are same. E.g devs use some C++ features which not implemented for XP and XP support also depends on external libraries/middleware used like Coherent UI and FMOD.

So it's all not as simple as you might think and Uber just make safe bet here. Anyway I think this game will be always crippled on 32-bit systems.

Isn't it entirely possible to dual boot with ubuntu linux to still run this game for free with xp?

I'm sorry to derail this serious discussion about OSs and forcing PA to run on them.

But I would just like to remind everyone that Uber already has stated, multiple times, that they will not support XP. If you can force it to run on there, great!

But don't try to force Uber to spend a bunch of time and effort on an almost dead(soon to be) OS, when they're already delaying the launch date.

YOu can discuss(argue) to your hearts contentment on here, however, just remember that THEY REALLY DON'T CARE HOW MUCH YOU WANT IT(you don't control the game, they do).

I now return you to your regularly scheduled bickering.

What I enjoyed about this thread was how the whole of page 2 was a discussion about 64 bit windows xp and if it worked or not.

As for windows 8. Using Start 8 has made it much more bearable.

Dear XP folks, on the 8th April 2014 your security updates stop. Please change OS, both for yourselves and for the rest of the Internet.

I'm on windows 7 but my graphics card is basically a tumble dryer and doesn't have SM 3.0. I don't care, I'll play low-fi indie games till I upgrade, then I can play PA. I wouldn't want the devs to gimp the project for the benefit of the dinosaurs.

That chart, cute as it is, falls apart when you realise no one thinks Windows 2000 was bad. I mean, I'd disagree on other points as well, but Windows 2000? What weirdo thought that sucked? And if Windows 2000 is on there, why aren't the Windows NTs? I believe that in this sort of diagram Windows 2000 would normally be Windows Me (and I had to go look that up, God it was so long ago).

I don't think any c++ features aren't available for XP. I use Visual Studio 2013, which has xp targeting support with all c++ features that Microsoft have implemented. (Except c++AMP, which I don't think is core c++ anyway).
To be perfectly honest I don't think they should support 32 bit anyway. x64 has been out for a long time, there is virtually no reason not to have it. Absolutely no reason if you want to play a game like this. I was playing a game with friends a couple of days ago, and we were using 3.5gb on a system I just threw together. It wasn't overly large, so I struggle to see how 32 would be able to run any but the smallest of maps.

There is lots of more powerful 32bit processors coming to the market.
Mainly in mobile devices like the one i had before the Acer im using now..
It was a crappy atom but still probably powerful enough to play PA..
So IMO 32bit support is still a good idea until 32bit is completely phased out of the market.
You never know 32bit mobile devices may eventually become really popular as low power devices, there is a large market of them out there selling now in many brands of tablets and netbooks.

Memory usage in the game should drop when more of the optimizations take place.
Planet biome and other things affect memory useage,,
size 1200 Earth planet with water set to 32-40 only uses about 1.4gb ram my end
size 1200 Earth planet with water set to below 10 uses over 4.8gb ram.
size 1200 Moon uses 1.1gb my end
size 2000 Moon used 4.8gb <--- EPICLY HUGE
1 size 800 ice planet + 2 size 150 moons used 3.6 gb ram

My point being 4gb of ram is fine for many different planet sizes, just no EPIC systems with 4 or 5 planets at this point in time.

Who cares about mobile devices while discussing the development of a large scale RTS game?
Besides - I doubt an atom would remotely be capable of handling the demand of PA.

I do..
I play PA on a mobile device..
Jon Mavor also stated "We are aiming at supporting SandyBridge as it is the most common mobile device GPU"
I'm sure others out there playing on laptops care too.
Just because it's a Large scale RTS it doesn't mean people don't want to play it on mobile devices!!

Sigh... First of all - Sandy Bridge are not GPUs. Most of them have integrated GPUs - Intel HD chipsets.
I don't even consider Sandy Bridge CPUs "mobile devices" per se, even if there are laptop variants. My 2600k runs PA just fine and has the Intel HD4000 and is a desktop chip.

Even if you play on your laptop: ALL of todays x86 laptop CPUs are x64 capable. ALL of them.
You were talking about Atom CPUs (which are all x64 capable except for the first generation) so you could even try to run it on those.
The 32bit CPUs you are talking about are ARM CPUs used in tablets and phones - those cannot run x86 programs so PA will never run on them.

That chart up there was absolutely right. Sadly, xp was one of the best, and enough people will keep updating it independently, as they already do patch through updates to run new games just as often as independent users create private patches for old games to work on new os.

That being said, me was to xp what vista was to 7, added bad things lost good things and added nothing percivably more-powerful.

So, my bet is that pa will and should not support xp, and one can look up on the internet how to easily get it to work in five steps or less.

this one is especially different as it's client-server.

finally people who don't own the up-top rig can tag along on a large scale RTS, because most of the complex calculations that require CPU horsepower are done server side.

I not really C++ developer so I can be wrong here, when alpha come out in other XP thread we find that executable using "system calls" (not sure how I should call NT kernel features on Windows) which is not exist in XP.

And on Linux game using C++11 features which only implemented in fairly new libstdc++.

Even without simulation mobile hardware won't be enough because ARM SOCs performance nowhere near to current-gen x86 CPUs and GPUs.

It's can be enough for some old console games, but for anything like PA? I doubt it.