In that case, how about catering to the majority of your customers by
developing what they can use? Seems like you have a choice, here; develop
what can be used by those who upgrade as you want them to do and lose the
majority of possible income, or develop for the majority of your customers
and lose out on the minority who decide to become more up to date. It
doesn't take much thought on which way to go if money is your goal. If 70
to 80 percent of my customers use Apple equipment, I'm going to develop
Apple software to sell to them. It does not make sense to sell to the other
20 or 30 percent in order to stay current with technology just for the sake
of staying current.
---
Shepherds are the best beasts, but Labs are a close second.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Thomas Ward" <[email protected]>
To: "Gamers Discussion list" <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, September 11, 2013 3:38 PM
Subject: Re: [Audyssey] A Note to XP users
Hi Dark,
Well, as you pointed out there is no need for us to dreg up the why
upgrade debate because we have been down that road before, and there
isn't anything new I can really say that hasn't already been said
before. Plus while I personally feel XP users are doing themselves a
disservice in the long run by not upgrading there isn't anything I can
say to convince them of that if they are dead set against it. A person
convinced against their will is of the same opinion still so there is
little point in trying.
All I will say is there are advantages in upgrading weather a user
such as yourself think they are worthwhile or not. There are features
I as a game developer could use that would come in handy on say
Windows 8 that isn't available on Windows XP which would come in handy
for games and is one reason I might decide against supporting XP for
certain titles.
For example, one feature available in SAPI 5.3, 5.4, and SAPI 5.5 is
SFML tags. These are little special tags that allows me to control the
pitch, volume, pauses, and over all tone of the SAPI voice while
speaking. The new SAPI 5.5 voices are very expressive when these SFML
tags are used, and those tags could be imbedded into a game using SAPI
to show excitement when a player scores or can speak in a low ominous
voice when a player dies. SAPI 5.1 and the voices like Mike, Mary, and
Sam for XP doesn't have this feature and are rather robotic when
speaking. Although, there aren't any SAPI games that use this SFML
tagging feature new games could certainly do so if the developer is
willing to scrap the notion of supporting XP. So that is where I get a
bit frustrated as a developer.
So Microsoft has added this tagging feature in newer versions of SAPI,
but a huge percentage of the blind can not use it because they are
running XP. Therefore if I add that feature and release the game for
Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8 I lose money because most of my
potential customers don't have the system requirements needed to run
my game. If I leave the feature out to remain backwards compatible
with XP I lose out on the feature even though I have everything up to
date. So by pandering to people who don't want to upgrade I can not
use newer Windows components and features simply because this
community for one reason or another won't upgrade and get with the
program. Kind of creating an impass as no matter what the developer
does someone looses out on features.
Cheers!
On 9/11/13, dark <[email protected]> wrote:
I'm quite aware sapi 5.5, advanced net framework etc aren't available for
xp, but I've still! not been convinced that there really is any reason to
upgrade since practically speaking it seems all I get is a more
irritating
interface and less compatibility with a good few games, and though these
components don't work, does anything good actually use them?
If microsoft want to sell me a new operating system, give me a reason
why! I
should use one, something it does better than xp, and no, having flashy
ribbons and the like isn't, indeed to me that's a negative (I still think
microsoft should've had the option for an xp like interface).
If lots of developers use these new components to create better games and
such, well maybe that would be a reason to upgrade, but that's not
happened
yet and I don't really see why i should say goodbye to 32 bit
compatibility,
and! stagger around a more stupid interface until that reason is there.
i don't doubt that will happen at some point in the future, but it
certainly
hasn't yet, and especially not from microsoft.
I don't want to start this debate again, since I think everything has
been
said that can be said, however I'm just pointing out there are perfectly
good reasons to stick with xp, and bigger numbers and newer versions of
components that most people only use to run other software aren't! a
reason
to upgrade if they're not used for anything good, which up to now they
haven't been.
Beware the grue!
Dark.
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