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Vermil

Doomsday 1.11 released

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Doomsday 1.11 has been released. The main focus of this release is the first stage of Doomsday's new mouse driven UI; the taskbar replaces the old console and a game selection menu has been added to ring zero. Other notable new features include the removal of the sub model limit to allow model makers to make more advanced models, and the restoration of the OpenAL sound plugin after it was broken during the rewrite. There's also the usual assortment of bug fixes, technical improvements and preparation for the future. With the release of 1.11, support for OSX 10.4 and Windows XP has been dropped. Download it from the homepage, and check the release notes.

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Vermil said:

With the release of 1.11, support for Windows XP has been dropped.


Huh?
Isn't that a bit premature?

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First let me assure you this decision was not taken lightly. It is however something we have needed to do for a while now.

As you may be aware Doomsday is developed using Qt and we are continually finding ourselves in a position where we cannot leverage much of it's excellent feature set in a coherent and uniform way because too often XYZ is not supported on Windows XP. I certainly don't expect this situation to change this late in the life of that OS.

Its not like older versions of Doomsday will simply drop off the face of the internet or simply stop working. For example, Doomsday 1.8.6 is still running fine for many people. Also, we are fully aware that Doomsday is not the only port available to the user. There are several excellent ports which will likely continue to maintain XP support a couple of years from now.

However, this is not all about XP. There are other platforms and architectures being considered here. Take OS X 10.4 for example. Compared to XP, this OS is barely a teenager yet it is being dropped for similar reasons.

For the past few stable versions we have held back as obviously there are still quite a few XP users out there. However, we believe that the tipping point has now been reached. We now need to cut the cord so that the experience of the majority using a modern OS is not compromised because of a minority clinging on to XP.

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DaniJ said:

As you may be aware Doomsday is developed using Qt and we are continually finding ourselves in a position where we cannot leverage much of it's excellent feature set in a coherent and uniform way because too often XYZ is not supported on Windows XP. I certainly don't expect this situation to change this late in the life of that OS.

I'm curious, what are a couple of those features which cannot be leveraged on XP?

When it comes to supported old OSes, I think you have to draw the line somewhere, for example very few projects would support Windows 95 these days. You guys have a prerogative to say XP is over that line, as even Microsoft has EOLed it, but I think in this community there are still many people using XP and it's not good to ignore that.

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Gives me another reason to stop muttering about dual-booting my desktop and actually do it. I'm less than impressed with what Microsoft has released since XP.

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I'm also interested in what Qt features are not available on XP. Doomseeker runs fine on XP as far as I'm aware. It would even run on 98 if we used MinGW instead of Visual Studio 2008.

Not that I personally have a problem with Doomsday dropping XP support, but like the others I find it a little odd. Especially since Microsoft was even forced to add support for XP on VS 2012.

andrewj said:

as even Microsoft has EOLed it,

Since when has still supported become EOLed? Sure it's extended paid support, but the updates still show up for normal users.

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andrewj said:

I'm curious, what are a couple of those features which cannot be leveraged on XP?



I honestly can't think of anything - which shifts the blame to Qt. If its developers no longer take XP seriously, it obviously means that support for the OS is declining.

(Which also makes it a bad tool to use IMO as XP still holds significant market share.)

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Well, for old computers which can only run Windows XP, if even that, there's Xubuntu as an alternative to extend their useful life. If Doomsday runs on Ubuntu, all's good.

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printz said:

If Doomsday runs on Ubuntu, all's good.



... unless the owner of said machine won't use Linux. Which with upgrade-resistant users is very likely.

Hell, considering that even the decision of ZDoom to end Win95 support was questioned...

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so this doom port is so futuristic and ahead of its time that it cant support xp? :>

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