Windows 7 RC + Games

[Spooky_uk]

Just got my new system up and running with X64 Win 7 - anyone know of any games that have issues or does pretty much everyhting run ok ? TIA

[tomos]

if it runs on vista, afaik it runs ok in win7 as well. only one i tried was crysis and it ran fine in the beta. havent installed it again for the RC

[Tempest]

I had some directX sillyness at the start with things saying DirectX was not installed and had to put DirectX9 onto it to make stuff work, but it didn't seem to do any hard and things are working.

For some reason I thought later versions of Direct X would do everything earlier versions did, and I was not happy having to put an old version on Windows7.

[target]

DirectX itself is backwards compatible. But there's this thing called Managed DirectX which is an API (a way programmers can use DirectX) that is version specific and is never included with Windows. It should be installed by the game that needs it but this would to an extent depend on the foresight of the setup developer as to how future versions of Windows are handled. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectX#.NET_Framework

It would seem that a lot of the trouble users are having with games in Win7 is when the game offers them the choice to install DX9 rather than just doing it and they think 'I've got 11 so i'll say no', when in actual fact you're meant to install it - whether you're happy to do so or not. :)

[nsb]

I've read problems of the new Tales of Monkey Island not working for alot of W7 users.

[target]

I've read problems of the new Tales of Monkey Island not working for alot of W7 users.

Are you sure? From what I can tell from their forums it's fine on W7.

Most of the people didn't install DX (the point of this thread).
Some people didn't meet the games minimum spec hardware wise (mostly graphics card) but just happened to also have W7
And some people got an error message because Telltales website was down when the game tried to check in and again just happened to have W7.

All of which are OS independent issues.

[shteve]

It's run every game I've tried with no issues. It even plays half-life 1 games ok (which for some reason have stopped working under vista64 for me, despite it being the same steam install).

[Spooky_uk]

cheers guys, good to know. COD4, COD5 and Crysis going on in the next day or so :thumbs:

[Tempest]

Call me stupid

But If Windows7 comes with DirectX 11 then if it's done the way it should be, then DX11 should offer and tick all the box's that DX9 does.

Seems crazy you have DX11 and a game won't run cos you don't have DX9 installed.

If thing need DX9 to run then DX9 should be part of windows 7 by default.. No?

[target]

DX11 does tick all the boxes that DX9 does - it is fully backwards compatible. The bits you're missing aren't strictly speaking parts of the core DirectX. They're sort of am optional go between the programming language and DirectX to make it easier for the programmer to use DirectX from .Net. It's the responsibility of the games installer to make sure they're present if developers use them rather than using DirectX directly. They've never ever shipped with any version of Windows, the only reason you won't have seen them missing before is you presumably installed something in your previous OS's that put those files there before you used some software that didn't.

That people are having this trouble is the fault of the installer developers. I've programmed a large installer before and my brief was for it to be fully automatic and to not ask the users any questions at all. A lot of users won't know anything about what you may ask them (this is also why zonealarm sucks!) and those that do can still make educated but incorrect choices as in this case. If your software needs a file, it's the easiest thing in the world for the setup to see if it's there and decide whether or not to install DirectX rather than leave that choice up to the user.

I should point out that any inaccuracies or vagueness in this post are due to the fact that I've never used DirectX and I am approaching this topic from the point of view of a setup developer after googling some stuff about DX. To me it doesn't seem any different to the thousands of other common system (dll) files in use by various programs around the world that aren't on the users system until the setup for the application that needs them puts them there. Many such files are developed by Microsoft and some you would think are used frequently enough that they could really be included with Windows but aren't (the Visual C runtime springs to mind!) :)

Finally, I don't disagree that life would be easier if they were present but for some reason it is by design and not a fault that it's not.
Unlike the DirectX runtime, Managed DirectX, XNA Framework or the Xbox 360 APIs (XInput, XACT etc) have not shipped as part of Windows. Developers are expected to redistribute the runtime components along with their games or applications

[Spooky_uk]

Can confirm I had to install DirectX9.0c with both COD4 and COD5.

[Tempest]

My worry was that installing DX9 on the top of DX11 was going to (and not sure if it has) screwed up DX11 in some way.

[target]

It should have no problem. The DX 11 included with 7 presumably, from what I've heard includes DX 9. So the DX9 setup itself should see those files which would be the same or probably newer file versions and not replace them with its older ones. It would then add the non core DX9 files which are not included in Windows but are needed by some/most/all games.