Linux

AFAIK, UE4 is planned to have native linux support.

To be frank, SM3 didn't cause me any headaches, because I had a real graphics card to begin with. Most of the drama was caused by mostly office PCs and older Laptops with ****** onboard Intel GPUs, and many of them didn't support SM3 on Windows either. However, DirectX 11 might cause some trouble when it becomes a definite requirement, since even the DirectX 10 rendering pipeline is still on wines to do list after what now? Seven years?

I wouldn't panic yet however. As far as I know, nothing was announced along the lines of making DX11 mandatory any time soon. Maybe we will miss out on tesselation, godrays and lensflares, but we will still be able to play for the time beeing. And wine will eventually get to a point where we can have those as well.

Ehh, I'd be surprised if they left the Mac population out in the cold by enforcing DX11.

It's a real interesting question as the Mac client is basically just a wine wrapper around the Windows code. Hoestly I don't see them being able to go DX11 only until their windows XP user base upgrades. That's a far larger population than their Mac or Linux userbase.

As far as Unreal Engine goes I don't think it's used in Eve. Valkyrie on the other hand uses UE4, and Dust UE3. I expect both Valkyrie and Legion to use UE4.1 or newer at release. As of UE 4.1 they should be able to compile for SteamOS/Linux. A lot really depends on the up take of the steambox, and linux games in general on steam.

Definitely possible, but it's still more than unlikely that Eve will be ported to UE 4 or anything else.

They officially supported Linux, too, for two years (starting with Trinity in 2007 and ending with Dominion release in 2008). And they dropped it once it was clear the effort wasn't worth it. But they dropped it nonetheless.

My concern is that DX9 userbase is falling like a rock in Windows land, and this might encourage them to flip the switch.

And with all the money they poured onto Carbon, I doubt they will switch to UE4 for the EVE client. Much less for the spaceship graphics engine.

The thing is, dx11 isn't new. and nor was shader 3 support when it was introduced to EVE. I'm a linux fan myself, and would be distinctly unhappy if I could no longer play EVE with wine. The "but" looming is pretty obvious though - how long will CCP and the majority of the player base be happy to be throttled by standards set in 2004 for dx9? There has to be a push to the better features at some point. Perhaps CCP will do a similar change over period to the dx9 one unless the current user choice can be maintained once actual features like tessellation can be added.

As for UE4 - I doubt we'd ever see it in eve unless the CQ gets ported from the Carbon engine and UE4 being linux native doesn't really help a windows exe running under wine :(

I wouldn't call it a "race". Unless racing includes hesitating and taking your ******* time. At the current rate the first AAA title to be released for linux will be Duke Nukem: Star Citizen.

As if MS dropping support for XP would bother anyone but corporate users.

As if XP users have anywhre to run.

MS declared end of sales for windows 7 OEM on oct 30 2014. Retail is already dead. Which leaves us with faildows 8. As if anyone would willingly use that.

Looks like it's time for me to blow off some steam. I built my first PC while I was stationed on Okinawa in 1987. Since it was 'home made' I got to select my OS. MS-DOS was not even in the running. The first time I ever saw Windoze was in 1993 when I went to work as a control systems engineer, and ended up getting stuck with the additional duty of IS/IT manager for the branch office I worked at.

As a consultant you have to be familiar with the software the client uses, and Mickeysoft was really hitting it's stride in those years. So Windoze it was. I started with WFW and was up to W2K when I was finally too disabled to work any more.

I did make the move from W2K to WXP, finally. Kicking and screaming all the way, but I had a breakdown and wasn't able to program at all for about 5 years. I just couldn't make my self do it because I knew that what I was writing was crap, and that just isn't me.

Things finally got better after I completely got out of the VA medical system and found a real doctor, who spoke English and everything. So I started getting back into computers. I really hadn't heard much about Win7 and 8 at that time. I think I was the only one within 20 miles who had a computer.

I finally decided to build a new computer for Windoze 8. However, after using it for three days, I formatted the drives and ran the install disk through my shredder. Surprisingly enough, it ate the whole thing.

So i decided to try Windoze 7. I figured it, or anything else, couldn't be as bad as Win 8. I think I used Win 7 for a couple of weeks, but it just didn't allow me to have the amount of control I was used to. If I wanted Bill Gates to decide what the future of my interactions with computers would be, I would offer to adopt him . . . not.

One good thing I have to say about ***xers is that they seem to agree with me, that the future of computers shouldn't be 'all about the money.' Computers are capable of a lot more than we get from them now, but we won't see it because it is not cost effective to build useful computers. So we get stuck with the dreck while the big computer manufacturers and OS design houses ignore what we want because they make more money that way. There's no standardization anymore. No one can force them to do that. We pay the price.

Especially since I just started learning how to program in Ada, the current situation reminds me that even governments, who we don't expect a lot from, have been more mature about computers than the American public.

Two examples:

1. Ada, and if you don't know anything about that, just ask.

2. The ESA computer system, and if you don't know anything about that, just ask.

I remember the one college course I took in computers. The language was WATFIV, which was a derivative of Fortran. It was back in the Hollerith card days when a gust of wind might blow your whole program off of the hand cart you hauled it around on. I had to spend 6 hours one day getting all the cards back in the right order. I decided then that I hated computers and would never have anything to do with them again.

Little did I know how impossible that would turn out to be.

Hmm. I was just reminded that CCP is never going to fix the posting problem on the forums. I hit the post button, and all I got was the quote at the beginning. However, being experienced with CCP produced software, I had a copy on the clipboard.