News Future support for Win 32 and DX10

JerryLove

JerryLove
CMDR QUANTIS TRAP said:
As far as I'm concerned if Frontier has done the math and think that dropping Win32, DX10 will not hurt the adoption of the game and profits, I'm all for it. It's not going to hurt me!
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The acid test should not be "does it hurt me personally" when defending others.

I see three issues.
1) What do I want? (I have DX12 and a high-end PC, so I want the best engine, feel free to kill off support for Win32, DX10, PS4, and XBOX; all of which hold the game back)
2) What offers the best ROI in terms of development? That's for Frontier's actuarial people to decide.
3) What's fair and moral? If you are going to take a game you sold someone, that worked on their system, and make it so that they can no longer play that game: you owe them a refund. (I'm not talking about whether you support them with season 3 (unless they are a lifer): I'm talking about if you stop them from being able to do tomorrow what they could do fine yesterday)
 
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dementia

dementia
David Braben said:
Hi Everyone,

As you know we spend a good deal of time planning for the future, and one issue (and opportunity) we are considering is the effect of supporting Win32 and DX10, and the benefits we would get if we were to drop them. As you know, we support leading edge technology like 4K, 8K, VR, and with things like compute shaders in Horizons we really push the boundaries overall, but there are restrictions with Win32 – particularly the amount of memory we can address at one time – and with DX10 in terms of requiring an alternative rendering solution in our code. Dropping these two would help us support high end effects with a better result – to make the game better.

About 0.5% of players that have installed Elite Dangerous have used their game on Win32 at some time. Some of these machines are capable of running Win64 (ie the hardware would support it). With DX10 (fewer than 2% of players) it is more tricky as you may need to upgrade the graphics card on such machines.

We do appreciate that although those are small percentages, that is still a significant number of people affected. We want to give as much notice as we can. It will be at least six months before we would make the change, but we want to know your opinions first, and to give warning that the change will need to come at some point, so please let us know.

Thanks.

David Braben
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With so few players on the Win32 and DX10 platform I vote you drop support. ED needs better visuals to keep up with No Mans Sky, Eve, Star Citizen, etc, etc so if Win32 is a barrier to that then it is worth dropping it.

Looking forward to atmospheric landings and life form worlds, I don't think you'll have much of a choice.

I'd go as far as saying that you should now be looking to support DX12 and looking to drop DX11 support as well.

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00prometheus said:
Actually, why not make it the long lost "off-line mode"??? So six months after the warning, the game simply becomes a stand-alone game with no multi-player aspects to it, and no server connection. That way you wouldn't even need to update the netcode any longer.
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A good idea in principal. I'd go as far as saying that it would be good is FD could release the server code so people go not only use an off line (i.e. not internet) instance but still have it on their home PC servers so you can do LAN play.
 
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JerryLove

JerryLove
dementia said:
I'd go as far as saying that you should now be looking to support DX12 and looking to drop DX11 support as well.
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You lose Win7: which is (I believe) a huge portion of the playerbase.

There's been some suggestions from the user community about moving to Vulkan.

A good idea in principal. I'd go as far as saying that it would be good is FD could release the server code so people go not only use an off line (i.e. not internet) instance but still have it on their home PC servers so you can do LAN play.
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The code is less an issue than the database (and some updates to the client to allow repointing).

That and the versioning. How do we keep servers up-to-date? Do we need to? RSI has been tackling those issues; but I don't know if the architecture of ED supports similar solutions.
 

Mot

M
While I'm all for new technology, I wont be playing ED on my laptop anymore(a decent new laptop is 3 large). I do have a nice desktop to play at home tho...
 

CMDR Dreamstate

CMDR Dreamstate
David Braben said:
Hi Everyone,

As you know we spend a good deal of time planning for the future, and one issue (and opportunity) we are considering is the effect of supporting Win32 and DX10, and the benefits we would get if we were to drop them. As you know, we support leading edge technology like 4K, 8K, VR, and with things like compute shaders in Horizons we really push the boundaries overall, but there are restrictions with Win32 – particularly the amount of memory we can address at one time – and with DX10 in terms of requiring an alternative rendering solution in our code. Dropping these two would help us support high end effects with a better result – to make the game better.

About 0.5% of players that have installed Elite Dangerous have used their game on Win32 at some time. Some of these machines are capable of running Win64 (ie the hardware would support it). With DX10 (fewer than 2% of players) it is more tricky as you may need to upgrade the graphics card on such machines.

We do appreciate that although those are small percentages, that is still a significant number of people affected. We want to give as much notice as we can. It will be at least six months before we would make the change, but we want to know your opinions first, and to give warning that the change will need to come at some point, so please let us know.

Thanks.

David Braben
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Great news, and now it is April, will the game start using DX11 or DX12 from 2.3 onwards? Or will this come at a later date?
 

mastershotgun

M
neutronium said:
DX12 only will mean that the game will be compatible with Windows 10 x64 only. Great idea (on making the game unplayable for ~50% of the PC Market).
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hahaha do you pray to those charts as well? Well they are not correct... For example if you run the HW survey on linux running steam in wine, you will get detected as WinXP(64bit)... And even you assumption is flawed because the table is not of all steam users, it is table of all steam users that participated in the survey. And this table is the steam table, not Frontier table, not every user that have steam is palying ED and not every user playig ED have steam, nor combined their steam account with ED (I did not for example). To get real data you need to go with Frontier numbers and they are saying that less than 2% of tier players cannot run DX12. if it really was that bad as you are suggesting and 50% was true number, I doubt that any company that want to generate profit would kill 50% of their customers like that
 

Shadowdancer

Shadowdancer
Iori said:
Star Citizen is going Vulkan only.

Wise choice.
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Only if it buys them immediate solutions to issues they're currently having, and I'm not sold on that. Listening to developer rants, you can apparently do quite a lot of trickery that DX12 and Vulkan are headlining with some careful use of DX11 already, and you'll have less of a headache doing so.

For Elite, the situation is like this (in order of prospective playerbase):
  • Windows: DX11 (platform: good support for DX11 and Vulkan, less coverage for DX12)
  • XBone: DX11(-ish, apparently it's DX11.2) (from a cursory search the platform has some DX12 capabilities, but I doubt Elite is using that)
  • PS4: GNMX (high level) and GNM (low level) (should be on Vulkan/DX12 level of capability overall)
  • Switch (TBA): Vulkan because the sucker is running Android
  • OSX: stone age OpenGL or Metal (platform is unlikely to support anything else in the foreseeable future, but Apple are fickle)

So ultimately, unless Frontier are aiming for that tasty Switch market, there's actually pretty little reason to change anything :)
 
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starman

starman
"The acid test should not be "does it hurt me personally" when defending others. "

That is exactly what happens every where all the time.

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Iori said:
Star Citizen is going Vulkan only.

Wise choice.
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May it live long and prosper.
 

EdzUp

EdzUp
Star Citizens jumping API system reminds me of Diaktana and it's engine jumps back in the day.

I would use OpenGL and go from there after all the best supported API will cause less headache to get cross platform than jumping to bleeding edge tech that might not work on everything
 

Neutronium

Neutronium
mastershotgun said:
hahaha do you pray to those charts as well? Well they are not correct... For example if you run the HW survey on linux running steam in wine, you will get detected as WinXP(64bit)... And even you assumption is flawed because the table is not of all steam users, it is table of all steam users that participated in the survey. And this table is the steam table, not Frontier table, not every user that have steam is palying ED and not every user playig ED have steam, nor combined their steam account with ED (I did not for example). To get real data you need to go with Frontier numbers and they are saying that less than 2% of tier players cannot run DX12. if it really was that bad as you are suggesting and 50% was true number, I doubt that any company that want to generate profit would kill 50% of their customers like that
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Ok so according to Frontier 98% of players can run DX12? Does this refer to hardware level only? i.e. they have a DX-12 capable GPU but they may not necessarily run DX12 OS (Win10x64)? Or are you saying 98% are on Windows 10 x64 and DX12 GPU? I find this 2nd scenario quite unlikely..
 

Ian Skippy

Ian Skippy
neutronium said:
Ok so according to Frontier 98% of players can run DX12? Does this refer to hardware level only? i.e. they have a DX-12 capable GPU but they may not necessarily run DX12 OS (Win10x64)? Or are you saying 98% are on Windows 10 x64 and DX12 GPU? I find this 2nd scenario quite unlikely..
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Frontier said that only .5% cannot run dx11, not 12. They are phasibg out dx10, not dx11.
 
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MickyG1982

M
Shadowdancer said:
While you're correct, people apparently don't want to comprehend the information that is presented to them.
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Very true, though DX12 would help out older (pre RYZEN & especially FX) CPU's & APU's by a lot. I wouldn't expect FD to do that (DX 11 is the smarter choice given their customer base) but, it would be an interesting thing to do to embrace DX12 (& it's performance gains) in addition to DX11.
 
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