What are the expected system requirements?

[SBKT]

^
What? I don't understand.

Please specify which part. I work better with less information to decode....

Am I supposed to explain Hamachi? It helps if the game has multiplayer, and you want to play a friend online, but the web service for that game sucks, such as with Worms Armaggedon. Hamachi creates a FAKE LAN with them so you can make the game think you're on an LAN with them, meaning less hassle in online gaming.

[Myxe]

Mid to high end video card you say, so do you mean a GeForce FX 5500 or an GeForce 8800 GTS?

[Alec]

Seems to run okay on a GeForce4 MX (which is supposedly equivalent to an ol' GeForce2?)

I think that's the "lowest" vid card we've tested it on yet. Once we've tested more we can elaborate.

[SBKT]

Seems to run okay on a GeForce4 MX (which is supposedly equivalent to an ol' GeForce2?)

I think that's the "lowest" vid card we've tested it on yet. Once we've tested more we can elaborate.

Uh, can you specif more on how powerful it is, like, there's the GPU and pipelines and MEgs and stuff. I know I had an ATI 3D Rage 2 somewhere... I could test it on 4MB integrated computer, Haw. I doubt it'd run too well, though.

There's two sets of requirement lists that you might want to produce. A MINIMUM requirement list, which means like, the absolute minimum to run the game, and the Optimum system requirements, which means, the lowest powers your computer must have in order to run it smoothly, like, good speeds and stuff.

[BMcC]

Seems to run okay on a GeForce4 MX.  I think that's the "lowest" vid card we've tested it on yet.

Hahahaha 

That's funny to me.

[JackDark]

This may seem like a joke, but it's not, will Aquaria run on Windows 98?  I haven't seen a game yet that makes me want to downgrade to XP, but damn it I will for Aquaria... if I have too.

[Assault]

This may seem like a joke, but it's not, will Aquaria run on Windows 98?  I haven't seen a game yet that makes me want to downgrade to XP, but damn it I will for Aquaria... if I have too.

You still use 98? Why not upgrade to Windows 2K, service pack 4, then? It's much more stable than 98. I've used it for years, only this year I moved to XP because the lack of support for 2K. Generally though, both XP and 2K are much better that 98 if you have 1 Gig of Ram.

[JackDark]

This may seem like a joke, but it's not, will Aquaria run on Windows 98?  I haven't seen a game yet that makes me want to downgrade to XP, but damn it I will for Aquaria... if I have too.

You still use 98? Why not upgrade to Windows 2K, service pack 4, then? It's much more stable than 98. I've used it for years, only this year I moved to XP because the lack of support for 2K. Generally though, both XP and 2K are much better that 98 if you have 1 Gig of Ram.

I use 98 because it runs all my graphic and audio apps perfectly.  I see no reason to downgrade to XP aside from having to to play games which require that OS.  Hence, I was wondering if Aquaria would or wouldn't.  My hardware will work fine, I imagine, I have a P4 prescott @ 2.4Ghz plus a 9600XT.

[Alec]

No idea about 98 yet. I think it could work, since there's nothing XP-specific about the game.

[PHeMoX]

No idea about 98 yet. I think it could work, since there's nothing XP-specific about the game.

If some functions of a later DirectX 9 version is needed, you might run into severe problems with Win 98 ... Win 98 isn't supported for DirectX 9.0c (20 dec 2005 or newer) , in my experience this really did mean that some games simply don't run on that OS. If Aquaria can run with DirectX 8.0 and doesn't have a DirectX 9 version be aware that DirectX 8.0 isn't supported in Windows Vista, anyways I think you know most of this already.

http://www.falconfly.de/directx.htm

[Alec]

I actually tested on a Windows 98 virtual machine a while back and ran into this. People using out of date Windows 2000 installs will also run into this problem. (I believe you have to update to SP4 before you can install DX9)

But - its all cool, cause I only use DX9 for XINPUT (XBox360 Controller) stuff, and its easy for me to build a separate EXE for 98 and out of date 2000.

So yeah: the game will run on Windows 98.

[Alec]

Update: reconsidering this, because it'd be messy to update two EXEs.

Trying to see if there's a way to load XINPUT.dll dynamically......

[PHeMoX]

Not sure if you can load the XINPUT1_1.dll dynamically to solve the problem, but the XBOX360 controllers themselves won't work on Windows 98 anyways, unless you're going to build some custom drivers for them to work ...

I mean currently there are no Win98 drivers for the XBOX360 controllers, it needs Windows XP with Service Pack 1 or later.

So if you use the XINPUT.dll only for the controller, perhaps you can support Win98 but without xbox360 controller support.

[Alec]

Yeah, that's what I just said basically. But having to release two exes would suck.

[nestor]

Trying to see if there's a way to load XINPUT.dll dynamically......

here's part of my code for getting a directInput Mouse started.

Code: [Select]


HRESULT (WINAPI *pDirectInput8Create)(HINSTANCE hinst, DWORD dwVersion, REFIID riidltf, LPVOID *ppvOut, LPUNKNOWN punkOuter) = 0;

if ( (winp.hInstDI = LoadLibrary( "dinput.dll" )) == 0 )
    /*  .. error .. */


if (!pDirectInput8Create) {
pDirectInput8Create = (HRESULT (__stdcall *)(HINSTANCE, DWORD ,REFIID, LPVOID *, LPUNKNOWN)) GetProcAddress(winp.hInstDI,"DirectInput8Create");

if (!pDirectInput8Create) {
error(L"Couldn't get DI proc addr\n");
}
}

this approach will work for a single .exe.  you'll need to maintain two code paths for the 360-controller input, is all.  probably turn it off/on with a global boolean.  All the functions that you use from the loaded dll are first declared as function pointers, and then fetched from the loaded dll w/ GetProcAddress. 

Also, win98 doesn't support Unicode w/o a patch or something.  so that could hinder backwards compatibility if you rely on it.

btw, can't wait to see your game.