Unity Dropping DirectX/Direct3D 9 Support

[Azrael5]

Dx9 apis are not related to XP but to the games themselves. So the change is motivated by the api supported by the recent games rather than XP. Considering also that unity is abandoned too after having disappointed so many users.

[philips]

You can force windows builds of Unity games to run with OpenGL using the '-force-opengl' option(on older builds) or the '-force-glcore' option on newer builds, fyi.

Only if the game is built for OpenGL too, which rarely happens. Since Unity 5, the OpenGL option is disabled by default and devs rarely bother to enable it at build time.

[smitty3268]

gallium 9 seems rather slow lately.
I don't see it completed any time soon,if at all.

Which part do you think isn't complete?

[Dukenukemx]

Well for me, it runs all the DX9 titles I've tried and runs them very well. It's holiday season as well, so maybe people are taking a break.

What Wine version you using? I tried Sarnex Wine for a while but his version is based off regular Wine and not Wine-Staging. I use wine-Staging for compatibility reasons.

[Geopirate]

Well this will help push Vulkan along with the other problem. MS is not going to let win 7/8 run Dx12. If you want a low level API in your new game to target these platforms Vulkan is the only option. I think this is what really pushed Star Citizen over the edge and more companies will follow.

[grok]

Losing Windows XP (to malware, deprecation and final EOL) was a big hassle.
I upgraded my PC at some point, getting a new vid card, only to find out my PC was still running like shit anyway. Windows 7 is like an aircraft carrier or a Soviet administration, it needs too many gigabytes to do the piles of digital paperwork it does.
If some of you had the recurring hundreds $$$ and the will to spend them on more and more upgrades just so you could play games that needed $shit version 3.0 or 3.2 instead of $shit 2.1, good for you.Then, browsers expanded to fill all RAM and CPU leaving me with the most powerful PC I've ever had but worthless at what used to be the only reason to use a PC (games).

If there are games coming out that are OpenGL 1.2, single-threaded (not counting I/O threads if any), that uses a few hundreds megs of RAM and aren't too big on storage space, I'll be very interested .
Advanced features : in the sound option screens, a choice between ALSA, Pulseaudio and OSS to see which work better or at all. Selectable pre-made keyboard layouts for non-qwerty users. Full screen mode (with alt-tab, though if alt-tab doesn't work but you can get out of the game with the shortcuts for virtual desktops, that's okay). Just make it a 4:3 game too, so that 16:9 users get very thick black bars on the side. (ok the last part is unnecessary but well). The hard part is, games like that used to have a seven-figure budget.

[axfelix]

The only Unity game that's worked for me in Wine with -force-glcore in recent memory is Offworld Trading Company, but I do hope they start shipping games with OpenGL shaders as a fallback by default again if they kill DX9. That'd be a fine tradeoff.

[Mike Frett]

"Those relying upon Wine to run Unity games on Linux that lack native ports will now need to use Wine's less-" Missing word in that space

[kpedersen]

Unity with the DX9 replacement SwiftShader allowed it to run on a virtual machine quite nicely. Then again, Unity don't really care about software lifespan / preservation or build servers; and neither do the kiddies that use Unity.

[ssokolow]

If there are games coming out that are OpenGL 1.2, single-threaded (not counting I/O threads if any), that uses a few hundreds megs of RAM and aren't too big on storage space, I'll be very interested .

From what I remember, OpenGL 2.0 was what introduced shaders, with 1.x being designed around fixed-function pipeline hardware... so you don't want to go pre-2.x because you'll lose basic functionality and may even take a performance hit since your game will be tying itself in knots to express its desires in old APIs that, in modern hardware, are just implemented as shaders built into the drivers anyway.

(Sort of like how old DOS and 68k Mac applications will peg your CPU because they were written at a time when CPUs didn't sleep in any meaningful way and any multitasking was cooperative rather than preemptive, so busy-waiting was considered a perfectly acceptable way to maximize responsiveness without complicated code.)