As we draw closer to our intended release date, we have a few announcements we want to throw out there. First off, we are dropping support for Windows XP. This decision has to do with the inability to provide in-depth support and also with Microsoft's decision to no longer support this operating system. More info can be found here: Freeworldstidesofwar.com
Second, we have opened up the creation of character profiles! You can now start creating your character on paper, paving the way for your own characters to step into the light. More info on creating characters and do's and don'ts are here: Freeworldstidesofwar.com
As we said last week, we've opened up our forums at www.freeworldstidesofwar.com and things are in full swing. Member Preacher is trying to start up a beta-story to get to know writing styles and to get his writing on. Join in and discover what characters are moving about behind the scenes!
Join us!
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If you like what you see, and have been playing, please don't forget to tell your friends, your communities you frequent and social sites like REDDIT/Twitter about this mod. Player word of mouth goes a long way and we'd appreciate any of the support we can get for this mod of ours! Thanks everyone!
I r nokalux, illegitamate bastard child of mara and palpatine and grand overlord of galaxy
I don't get it. Does dropping support for it means it physically won't launch in xp? Why the big deal? Why an artificial barrier? If it works, great, why stop it? You are still using DirectX 9 so that isn't a factor. You still are using the standard freelancer executable as this is just a mod right? In which case, how can you stop it from launching?
What about wine in xp mode (typically default setting)? forcing people to move it up to vista mode to launch for no reason would break a lot of stuff that are limited to xp mode, and just be generally inconvenient.
In short, you NEED to support XP because freelancer does!
Dropping support means that we won't be troubleshooting anyone with XP problems. Our engine doesn't play nice with XP, and certain problems just don't have easy solutions (we don't have the manpower to track down these issues). If it runs, it runs, if it doesn't, we'll try to help you, but there are no guarantees.
I see, you made it sound like you would block xp. Which would be different.
I can't really blame any game developer, especially a small independent mod developer like this, for not wanting to waste time and effort supporting an operating system that is over a decade old (XP) or a system that is so incompatible with gaming (Macs).
Without getting into overly technical problems, one of the largest issues with XP and mods like this is RAM limits. XP has a hard cap on available RAM; no matter how much is installed, it can only recognize 4GB. And like 1GB of that is occupied by the operating system itself. So you're looking at only 3GB of available RAM to run the entire computer, including what seems to be a very graphically demanding game (I am talking of course of this one).
Actually, RAM isn't as much of an issue as you would think. Freelancer is quite amazing at keeping RAM usage low (it was designed for computers with under 1GB of RAM after all). The kicker is that we're using modern APIs with modern compilers which have progressively deprecated XP-specific support. We'd have to recompile and probably redesign some pieces of our client hook (which is what handles *everything* including gameplay modifications, graphics, etc.) to run on XP. For an OS this old, which we cannot test on because nobody has an XP box anymore, it's just not worthwhile.
Besides, I wasn't talking about mac, Mac has wineskin which can be configured on a program by program basis. Linux on the other hand uses the single install of wine. And according to Steam it IS a gaming system. (Or at least will be)
I'm afraid we won't support wine either. You're on your own with that one :)
Bit early for April fools do you not think?
Not a joke though. If you are running XP and run into problems, we'll do what we can but we won't go through extraneous effort to fix any issues that might crop up.
So which operating systems currently are supported? Does freelancer even work on windows 7/8?
We'll support Vista (if we have to), Windows 7 and Windows 8 and 8.1. So far most of our devs are on Windows 8 and myself and a few others are on 7 so we can guarantee that those two work!