Windows Vista/Longhorn compatiability
Archives Forums/Win32 Discussion/Windows Vista/Longhorn compatiability
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| Any info (may have missed it..) on the compatiability of Blitz3D/BlitzMax with the next version of Windows? +BlackD |
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| They should work, just run a bit slower. Both dx7 and ogl will probably be a translation layer over dx10 (or is it just dx9 in vista?) |
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| As I understand it, the first public Vista of beta featured DX8 and actually runs Blitz (not sure if it was B3D/Max) progs a little faster. As I understand it, in Vista final, Aeroglass (powered by DX10) will be switched off whenever a pre-DX10 (DX9-) or OGL app is to be used. |
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| It seems Aeroglass gets dumped at the slightest hint of being asked to be backwards compatible. That's going to be pretty unavoidable with the way M$ are (ab)using the graphics system! Considering that we're writing games and they run in full-screen (99.99% of us anyway) this isn't going to be a problem. Same with OpenGL. M$ are crippling it severly in their current build of Vista, but if you switch to fullscreen you don't have any problems. What we do get is a speedup over XP because Vista will supply the capability to disable major portions of the OS as part of your game startup, freeing up many more resources than XP is able to do. |
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| I think windowed mode gaming is incredibly important for casual games. |
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| Windowed mode casual games do not generally require exclusive access to all your system's resources, which fullscreen games generally do. Blitz will undoubtedly suffer in this respect, unless M$ manage to not have to dump Aeroglass if a DX7 app is running in a window. Time will tell. However, windowed games are generally expected to multitask well, which is not exactly a common aspect with many people's Blitz coding practices. So, you really have to consider if this is going to affect us poor Blitz users too much. BlitzMax will perhaps reach a better level of stability and maturity by the time we all would very much like to begin using Vista. I am fairly confident that Mark S is an intelligent chap and will therefore already be working towards a "BlitzMax loves Vista" state of affairs. |
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| Great. Thanks for the info. +BlackD |
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| I just installed Vista Ultimate yesterday (the release to manufacturer version for MSDN dev's) and launching a Windowed Blitz app does drop it out of Aero. Your whole screen goes black for a second or two, then the app launches. When you close the app it does the same again. It is pretty jarring and disappointing. I am developing some "casual" games that I want running in windowed mode and this hurts for Vista compatibility. |
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| Using the BlitzMax DX9 driver fixed all my problems with Vista dropping to Vista Basic. |
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