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Win98/NT?

Started by scippie 5 replies 1k views
Original Post
scippie
scippie
Hi, We are developing an adventure game. Now when showing texts, I use a truetype font to draw it on a texture (GDI->directx). At this moment, I use AddFontResource(filename) to make sure the font is loaded (without needing to install it in the fonts directory). But I would like to be able to load the font from a resource file to prevent people from stealing it. I see that AddFontMemResourceEx does this, but hey... big problem, it only works since Windows 2000 & up. Win95/98/NT doesn't support this. Now I'm wondering: * Should I ban my game from Win98/NT? Or in other words: are there still gamers using windows 98? * Is there another way maybe? Of course, there's always the method of converting it to a bitmap font, but I prefer not to.
ApochPiQ
ApochPiQ
You could pack the font file into your .EXE as a binary resource, and extract it to a temporary, hidden file when the program runs. That should be a fair balance.


In general, although 98 and NT are both officially "End of Life" at this point, they are still in fairly widespread use. If you're aiming towards casual gamers or not-top-of-the-line-hardcore gamers at all, it's generally safe to assume someone out there still runs 98. However, that said, I personally wouldn't bother trying to support it unless you stand to make a lot of money on your project (and by that I mean you've already sold it to customers on 98).
Colin Jeanne
Colin Jeanne
I dont believe that Firefox supports anything below Win2000 in its upcoming release. Based on that, I'd say it's safe to require Win2000.
markr
markr
I think it boils down to

- How much extra work is it to test each release under NT / Win98?
- If it fails, how much extra work is required to compensate (e.g. under WinNT, I suspect only very old DirectX / Direct3d versions are available, which might not matter if you use OpenGL and the latest drivers are available)

Personally I don't think that very many people use WinNT (Although a lot use Win98, mostly home users).

Those who do use still use WinNT, don't expect to be playing games on it as they're mostly stuff like banks and PoS terminals.

Surely you already have to have a lot of boxes (or multiboot) to test with win2k, winXp versions (different service pack etc) anyway?

Mark
Palidine
Palidine
many games now require at least win2000. and even then a lot of those games have pretty significant bugs on win2000 that never seem to get fixed. i think it's also relatively safe to assume that a machine running win98 is pretty damn old and might be unlikely to meet your minspec requirements anyway

-me
Excors
Excors
Quote:
Original post by Colin Jeanne
I dont believe that Firefox supports anything below Win2000 in its upcoming release. Based on that, I'd say it's safe to require Win2000.

I believe that's Firefox 3 (some time next year) and not the upcoming Firefox 2 (some time next month), so it's not entirely imminent. (It seems to be largely caused by their move to a new rendering system which relies on Win2K+, and a lack of desire to continue supporting old OSes that not even Microsoft supports. Actually, that system is already used for SVG and it means "text rendering [in SVG] does not work on Windows 98 machines", but people haven't complained as much as if text rendering stopped working in all their web pages.)
TheAdmiral
TheAdmiral
Windows 98 is an antique. Microsoft don't support any longer it and neither should anybody else, unless it's a trivial job or you have a very good reason.
Since Windows ME, the Win32 API has been updated considerably. Kernel32 is barely recongisable anymore [hyperbole]. Developers can't be expected to use deprecated libraries just to account for the stragglers. I say you give them the finger and never look back.

Regards
Admiral
Ring3 Circus - Diary of a programmer, journal of a hacker.

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