Looking far ahead...

[Techwright]

Had a crazy thought the other day.  I've a stack of old game CDs in storage dating all the way back to Windows 95 days.  Some of them still play, and some of them are unfortunately in need of purging because they do not function with modern operating systems.  Those are local computer games though, and this is an online MMO.  Does this situation potentially apply to CoH and its engine? At some point we'd possibly get an operation system or systems that are completely incompatible with it?  What then?  I know the companies that own other games occasionally upgrade their software to remain compatible, but those are the owners.  It's their buck and their decision.  Homecoming is the licensee, and I'm curious what that might mean. 

[Player2]

Well, so far we only have to worry about Windows 11 and I believe a number of people have shown that things are running just fine on that.  Who knows what will be the deal with Windows 12 even though at one point they told us that we wouldn't be moving past Windows 10.  Eventually all things change, and I'm sure when we get to that point, the talented people working on the HC team will either figure out how to make it work or we'll all just have to run an older system.

[Greycat]

Windows 12 wouldn't be an issue. If we're still dealing with this at "Windows 17" or something, then possibly. Of course, given a few years between major windows releases (Windows 10 was released in 2015, Windows 11 in 2021 - Windows 7 and 8 (including 8.1) were about 3 years apart, XP was kind of an outlier at 9 years... though that's what Win10 is at now. So a Windows 17 would be... given 3 years between releases as an average - over a decade from now.)

 

Mac... who knows what Apple will do.

 

However, yes. All software will eventually become unusable or incompatible. We use (as I recall) an old version of OpenGL in the graphics engine - that might go far out of support. PCs may move away from the x86 architecture, or it may evolve to a point where it's not worth even emulating or translating old instructions we use into whatever the new chips are.

 

Really probably not something to worry about.

[starro]

I have faith in the COH community that  even if this game is played by just senior citizens in the 2040s and computers drastically change to lasers and quantum mechanics someone will mod it or find a way to hook this game up to work on a potato.