Em-8ER & Windows 7

P

punkbuzter#6186

Guest
#1
Introduction and Topic:
Hi again! So... I will make a new thread about this issue since there's a whole lot to talk about, a lot has been discovered, and lots of tests performed. And in this thread I will talk about the MOVEMENT, and GRAPPLING demos specifically, since I managed to get the ART demo running flawlessly.
Just to make things CRYSTAL CLEAR I do not intend to say the devs should support Win7.

Let's begin.
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The Problem:
To begin with, let's start with what actually happens. So... As soon as the app/demo launches it's stuck in black screen regardless of elevation, and it consumes just about a hundred megabytes of RAM, GPU/CPU utilization is zero. I have went through a plethora of Windows Updates and various distributions and SDK's just to narrow down the source of the problem. I have spent weeks! And thus far, it is safe to say that the problem is at least not a missing driver or update of any sort.

The Discoveries:
Previously, I have discovered that the ART demo uses the older version XINPUT1_3.dll, where as MOVEMENT and GRAPPLING uses the XINPUT1_4.dll library and this was only ever included in Windows 10. But the question remains, why?
It was a guestimate that the demos were now using DX12 but this has been debunked as I have a log file that specifically says the game is requesting DX11, there's 15 lines in my MOVEMENT demo .log telling me it wants to use DX11.

Another discovery I made was when I came across the developer and changelog pages for UnrealEngine 4, the official Epic forum. It was for a while suspected that something within UnrealEngine has changed that rendered the use of Win7 non-supported and was now only supporting Win10, but that has been debunked as well as Epic's development team themselves still makes patches in UnrealEngine for Win7. As an example, in the "Hotfix v4.25.2" changelog there's a line that says it fixed a debug code for Win7.

I also happened to come across another game using the exact same version of UnrealEngine as the non-working demos of Ember, the version 4.25, and surprisingly the problem is the same, identically. And this leads us to the conclusions...

Conclusion:
Again, while I don't say that I'm asking for Win7 support, it is safe to say that the problem is not Win7, does that make sense? I believe the problem is tied to UnrealEngine itself, specifically the version 4.25. But, if Epic has actually dropped support for Win7 I would like for people to be civil about it and post me an official statement from their own websites. After all, in Ember's current state I would say it's as barebone as it gets, so if UE4 works on Win7 so should Ember, technically.
Of course this doesn't mean that Ember won't support anything but DX12 at launch, it still makes an interesting topic about why the demos doesn't work for us Win7-peasants.
If Ember's next demo(s) will work on Win7 remains to be seen, but as recent Chief Chat uncovered a part of Ember's future it sounds the game will utilize technologies from both Nvidia and AMD that probably will end/kill the support for anything below Win10 anyway.

I know, it sucks, we paid with real money to access a game/demo that won't even launch, but that's what we get, and the game is still in its pre, pre-pre alpha state or whatever so bugs are to be expected. We can't ask for more than the next demo to do better if the engine allows it by default.
 
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Pandagnome

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#2
I'd hope the support for windows 7 would continue although i have no idea what will happen.
I am using windows 10 because of games and the updates, windows 7 was my fave os well xp and then windows 7.

I'd also hope linux/mac users can get to play the game but that could be more work, yet do hope this could happen!

I am not even sure if they will have some kind of cross-play with console players because that is something i wonder for the future.

Right now there is much planning happening only time will tell what can happen i am optimistically feel this will be a Gem .... look at that spider mek tank :cool::D

Please do not fail the reapers we have traveled from far and edging closer and closer to our home world!