Guild of Writers

On April 8, 2014, support for Windows XP will officially end.

In the same vein, we will be dropping support for the VC++2010 on that same day. From April 8, 2014 onward, the only Microsoft compiler that H-uru/Plasma will support is VC++2013. The devlibs package will be updated around this time to contain newly compiled dependencies. By making this upgrade, we can continue to modernize the codebase and remove platform specific hacks. It also makes our life easier in general

Do you have a layman's terms translation for those of us who are not so coder savvy concerning how it will effect someone still using XP, Max 7 and the original plug-ins from Cyan ?

XP will stop receiving security updates from Microsoft in April. You should upgrade to a newer Windows before then or you WILL be vulnerable to viruses.

The plugins and client that we build will stop supporting XP after that date as well, since we're not comfortable encouraging people to use an insecure version of their operating system.

You'll still be able to use Cyan's plugin and max 7 on XP, but again I highly recommend you upgrade. We'll do our best to have the plugin fully-functional in newer max versions by the time we drop XP support, so you'll be able to use a version of max that works on modern windows.

Max 7 still works for me under Windows 8.1...

Max 7 works fine for me under Windows 7 as well.

I don't like the idea of having to upgrade my version of visual studio if I want to do some work on H-URU since I suffer from this "major" issue:
http://www.thestar.com/business/tech_ne ... study.html
My main issue isn't speed, it's the amount of things I can download a month, which isn't that high.
Oh well I probably have to upgrade eventually if I want to use .NET 5.0 .

Please be advised that the minimum compiler version for H-uru/Plasma is now Visual C++ 2013. Also, be notice that as of #398, we now use the UTF-8 (non-wide character) version of expat.

What is the advantage of dropping support for older Visaul Studioes?

jamie_marchant wrote:What is the advantage of dropping support for older Visual Studios?

Microsoft has been slowly increasing the standards-compliance of their compiler, but they have not been back-porting all of these updates to the older compilers. This means better, cleaner code that is easier to maintain and easier to fix existing features as well as add new ones. Often this can now be done using C++ standard library code instead of third-party libraries, which makes building and maintaining the engine easier as well for new developers.

Another benefit of being able to use these C++ features is parity with compilers available on Linux and OSX, which is another step toward someday being able to target those platforms natively.

We've always made sure that we support freely-available compilers, and this is still true. Visual Studio 2013 Express is only a download away (and has been for some time, along with our notifications that this change was coming).

VS2013 is 5 GB, the time and 'download cost'[commonly incorrectly referd to as 'bandwidth'] is too high for me for a project I only play around with and never contribute towards. It's too bad you can't download just the compiler(I think you could with previews versions) or just VSC++.