Poll: what if Unity dropped old OSes?

83% for the "Kill them! Kill them ALL! BWAHAHAHAAA!" option.

I think this is what we'd call a landslide victory.

*

As I said in reply to the GPU poll: my opinion is that any component, be it hardware or software, that is no longer supported by its own manufacturer, is no longer deserving of support by anyone else either.

Even the original Windows XP is technically unsupported; I'd limit its support to SP3+, if only for the security enhancements.

 

Drop it, people with those 12 year old operating systems probably aren't even interested in games. Simple logic.

 

Aras,

Last year we had 39,000 consumer users with the specs you're thinking of dropping. And in schools, which are our primary client, the % of users with those specs is much higher than in the mainstream market. So . . . you would really be costing us some significant relationships and revenue if you press forward with this plan.

If you find that you absolutely have to drop support for all these, could you please give us a bit more time to plan that into our development? If you could push this off until 4.0 that would give us sufficient time to put together a good fallback plan for our users.

I fully support cutting off older users from certain features that they can't handle, as long as they can still play at a reduced quality level. But it's bad if they can't play at all. We obviously don't want to have our discussions with a massive school district involve "Well, a lot of your schools won't actually be able to use the program, but . . . "

Thanks,

Ben Harrison
President
Big Brainz

 

You can still use Unity 2.6 to 3.4.1 with support for DX6-8 hardware.

 

Since this thread is still alive:

http://unity3d.com/unity/whats-new/unity-3.4.1

 

Aras,

Windows 2000: Insignificant
PPC 10.3: Insignificant
PPC 10.4: 38,500 users
PPC 10.5: 13,480 users

However, that doesn't include school districts. Macs have a much higher penetration rate in schools and Apple was selling them PPCs just six years ago, so some of these districts are stuck with them for another 2 to 3 years. It's a shame that Apple is turning their backs on the segment that kept them alive in the pre-iPod days.

In general these are stand-alone builds, so we can survive. However, could you please consider drawing your line in the sand just AFTER the new GUI rather than just before? We cannot release our latest version without the new GUI because it won't run effectively on the iPad. That's why it would be so much easier to split our code after the new GUI. Yes, we could switch to EZGUI, but I strongly doubt that will be as viable a long-term, integrated, awesome option as Unity's version.

It's certain we'll have to stop supporting these guys shortly, so I don't want to invest too much in supporting a losing battle, but it would be very helpful to be able to settle in on a version of Unity that has the new GUI so that we can effectively develop for both computers and tablets. Maybe a 3.4.5 with GUI?

 

I vote to drop support for old OS.

And please focus your energy on latest Os.

 

It seems PowerPC has been dropped... and I wanted to see how my game would run on my eMac lol.

 

Way to bump a year old thread, POLYGAMe. PPC has been dropped, and it's a good thing. Let's let this thread rest.

 

Even APPLE stopped supporting PowerPC. It should have been dropped long time ago.
On the other hand, Windows XP should be kept for a long while. There is still a significant 25% (1 in 4 !) of people using Windows XP (April 2012 data).

 

First off, there was no need to necro this thread; the decisions were made almost a year ago. Second off, an eMac doesn't have the power to play modern games. There is nothing left, as SevenBits said, to add to this conversation.

I guess BeOS and NeXTSTEP are in other.

 

On the windows front, as long as you keep supporting at least XP were are good( although many of us have upgraded kicking and screaming to Vista and Windows 7- my OS) .

 

And yet I added something... it's called an opinion.

And as for playing "modern games", I happen to specialise in retro styled stuff, that I would LIKE to have running on older hardware, if possible... so it seems not everyone has the same ideas! GASP!

EDIT: Not to mention the fact that iOS and Android are still nowhere near as powerful as a G5 Mac (or even my eMac), so your point on playing "modern games" is moot.

 

NeXTSTEP? You seriously do realize no one uses that anymore, right? And what even is BeOS?

 

LOL... what even is NeXTSTEP? I say bring back Commodore BASIC 2.0... that thing never crashed

 

First off, adding your opinion to a discussion that has already had results is like saying "you shouldn't eat that" after the person has already eaten whatever it is you were talking about.

Older hardware is just that: older hardware. An eMac isn't exactly retro yet, and doesn't have much use anymore. It wasn't powerful so there weren't good graphics on it, and "bad graphics" isn't synonymous with "retro graphics." Most people who have had them have phased them out and are willing to and would rather run retro-looking games on their newer machines. Anything an eMac could do, a newer computer can do (other than PPC apps on newer macs because of the lack of Rosetta). Nobody develops for hardware that underpowered and old anymore, especially in fast-moving tech time.

That is why iPhone games don't look quite as good as games that are playable by an eMac.

Yet another example of why the internet needs a sarcasm/joking tag or font. Also, BeOS was an operating system that wasn't widely used. Most people used it along with a computer with their primary OS (generally Windows or Mac and the occasional Linux). It was to the older operating systems what the modern Mac or Alienware is to computers, sleek looking, but a lot more expensive.

As I'm no longer adding anything of substance, I'm leaving this long-dead thread that shouldn't have been necroed in the first place.

 

Or how about a System I UNIX machine? I would love it if Unity added support for a machine with only a few KiBs of RAM! I mean, I'd make thousands of sales!

 

NO! I want to make new games on my windows 2000 vintage! lol, just kidding, yeah you guys are clear to drop.

 

I have to admit, I was highly disappointed there were not Basic and Pro options for the Vic20 or C64.

Then again, they'll be doing Linux - so maybe I can deploy to the new Commodore OS...

 

I can see why you'd want to retain support for old systems if your target market still had them scattered throughout the place (eg: schools and/or government departments in my part of the world). They might make up well under 1% of the total machines throughout the world, but if your target sits over a large portion of that 1% then what the other 99% of the world has is beside the point.

But if that's a concern then I expect that an older version of Unity would continue to do the job just fine for you - the client clearly prefers lowest-common-denominator support over cutting edge features, and their hardware most likely wouldn't support those features anyway*. The real issue is living without whatever pipeline / development-side improvements Unity has made, but if your project has been going well without them so far then they almost certainly aren't essential to the project's survival.

* The GUI system is potentially an unfortunate exception in every regard here, though it's only really an issue if you have a complicated UI.

 

Yeah, that's always an option! Rock on!

 

I'm gonna guess it's mostly FreeBSD.