WOLFCODER'S PROFILE

On the other hand, I work in a computer repair shop in a low-income area

But you're going about your own local area. If I went by my own local low-income area, I would (mistakenly) believe everyone is running Windows 8. For some reason, all the cheap machines around here have Windows 8 pre-installed so that's what gets used most often. But the reality is that everywhere in the world, Windows 8 has very poor adoption and everyone's running Windows 7 and some do Windows XP except for China. I do not know why China is dominated by Windows XP.

Going by information you observe from the people physically around you is the myopia I am talking about.

And a lot of these people play games, but they only play free games

People playing free games are using tablets (even though many things are cheap/microtransaction based). I should lament that LandTraveller does not run on mobile devices like the iPad or Android Tablet. My decision isn't entirely stat-based or I would have written a mobile game.

So naturally, your Steam friends are going to pay for a newer computer with a newer OS in situations when others wouldn't.

Wrong, almost all my Steam friends play freemium or cheap Indie games (Warframe, Terraria, Spiral Knights, Team Fortress 2, etc.). They like that LandTraveller will be free, but they told me they would still pay a small price for it were it sold and suggested I try Steam Greenlight.

They're probably not an "average" demographic. Especially if you're making this a free game, which I think you are.

My largest target audience is furries from US and Canada (apparently). Steam and XFire can actually tell you what the average demographics are. I think I can even look up what games are most commonly played by people specifically in my testing group. Minecraft and Terraria are very often played, but the most often game apparently played by furries (from about eight groups of over 10,000 members) is Team Fortress 2. I do not understand why. Team Fortress 2 is a free microtransaction-based game with people able to set up their own serves.

Thanks for testing, I saw all your attempts in the server log of you using an account named LockeZ and making a character named Hikari.

It wouldn't actually let me select that text to copy it in the final error window, but if you really care about the details I can probably figure some convoluted way out to grab the entire log.

The stuff in there actually doesn't tell me anything useful. My XP test environment has no anti virus or firewall of any kind, but it crashes like this sometimes. The engine will sometimes start, and the engine will sometimes not. When using a debug build, the crash occurs somewhere deep in the NT 5 kernel, so I have no idea what's crashing.

HOWEVER! If I turn off ESET Smart Security's firewall, I can log in! But. The window then closes itself less than 1 second after the map appears.

Also note the connection indicator at the bottom right. If it starts turning yellow at one bar, it usually means the connection jammed and you're about to get disconnected / crash. If not, it bounces back to green at some point.

However, it might be the OS or it might be something else.

I've been able to narrow it down to how Windows XP handles socket send/recv functions in WINSOCK 2.2 differently from NT 6 (Vista, 7, 8), AND the random crashing occurs somewhere deep inside NT 6 according to my debugger's stack trace.

I would recommend trying to get Windows XP working since it's currently the second most widely used OS in the world, accounting for 38.7% of online users, very close behind Windows 7.

It's also going to be unsupported by Microsoft themselves (no more security!) next year. You will need to upgrade to something in order to maintain a secure system (your anti virus can only do so much, I've had stuff make it through NOD32 anyways and I had to personally destroy it).

Hardcore gamers are more likely to have 64-bit processors

LandTraveller is compiled under x86 (32-bit). It will run on both 32 and 64 bit machines (x86 / x64). Yes, that means its also not large-address aware, but my game doesn't need that much RAM to run.

I've gotten LandTraveller to play online in Windows XP a few times just fine where I dug out trees and such. Whether or you crash or not seems random. The saving grace is that if you're playing multiplayer and your computer crashes, the server still saves your character where it was. So oddly enough, if you're going to play LandTraveller on Windows XP, its better online so that if it crashes you won't lose all your progress.. Once you can get it to run online.

but people playing this type of game, probably not so much - especially since this is the first piece of software I've ever seen that ran in Windows 7 but not Windows XP.

This is actually a community-based thing. Members of RMN can easily suffer myopia because this site seems big and vast in member base, but really it's an RPG Making cult when you look at stats compared to the other places I've been posting LandTraveller.

Myself included! I have demoed this to people at dream.in.code and the furry groups on steam and everything just seemed fine.. Because everyone was using Windows 7 and Windows 8. I had a difficult time even testing this with XP because nobody I know in my release group on steam was running Windows XP still. RMN is different, I can believe people keep using ancient relics of the early 2000s forever.

You also have to factor in population density. The % for Windows XP is so high only because Windows XP dominates China and China has most of the population in the world who take their computer online. In the US, Windows 7 has everyone conquered. LandTraveller lacks international language support anyways so even if it ran in Windows XP, nobody in China can play it yet (they can, they just can't chat in Chinese).

This decision was made because Microsoft is going to kill support for it anyways and it's going the way of Windows 9X / 2000. It's been over 10 years.

LandTraveller is based off the same methods that 20XX used, and yes 20XX will randomly crash in Windows XP on some machines. Just flip through the old comments, I noticed some of the startup crashes people were experiencing are Windows XP related. It just didn't happen that often because 20XX didn't have online parts to it.

If you're not a hardcore gamer and don't want to use the newer versions of Windows, just get Linux. Valve is moving to Linux and there's already a library of games you can get using the Steam on Linux platform. LandTraveller should run in Wine without any tinkering.

Still, when LandTraveller reaches beta and most of the features are implemented, I might have a Windows XP debug session. I can make it a little more stable, but I still can't guarantee full support.



The bottom line is, very little people In the US are using anything but Windows 7 and Mac OSX has overtaken Windows XP recently. Oh did I mention there's a Wine for mac? It's hilarious that I should consider PORTING TO MAC before I consider supporting Windows XP. If I can just target Wine though, I won't need to port. Wine is not an emulator.

If KentonA can tally up the members and the most common OS used (OS is in browser header data), I wouldn't be surprised if most of the people at RMN still use Windows XP even though the density everywhere else is using Windows 7.

Something is wrong on your machine, or your ISP. The link has never changed from https://subversion.assembla.com/svn/landtraveller/landtraveller.zip

If you post the details of "it tells me it cant be downloaded." (who is 'it' and how does it tell you 'it cant be downloaded'), I can try to help.

It never did, use the regular arrows, Z, X, Enter, etc. I haven't added the NumPad yet.

Great stuff! Now you can do fire and lights properly. I'm uploading a screen.


I need to remove the screenshot label from the actual screenshot >.<