Windows 7 compliance

#1 The first one requires that you recreate the graphics context again and reload all textures etc. No way around that as windows trashes any graphics context when going to the admin screen.

#2 Do a little search on this in the forums. There is a solution out there that I've successfully used. (At least, it fixed the exact same problem in Vista.)

As a note, I get MUCH better search results at Google by typing in "SEARCH TERMS site:garagegames.com".

#3 Ahhhh... here it is!

#4 We've successfully released "Fix-it-up" on many portals including MSN Games. And we've made it working under Vista. Alas - it's not working under Windows 7 and it's report from my distributor. So i doubt if Vista fixes would work in that case.

Thanks for effort anyway - we would check the advice you've posted - maybe that would help.

As for search engine - some time ago google's one was used here, then GG.com quit google engine and invented their own (which is not the best) with private forums locked for unlogged (including google bot) - good advice those are open now.

#5 Well that sucks then!

Somebody recently posted this link to Oberon's Certification steps. It'd be nice if T2D passed all of the operating system tests right out of the box. *HINT HINT WINK WINK* *HEHE!*

#6 Sadly with TGB on the support chopping block in favor of the new n' improved T2D, it may be up to us to fix these Windows 7 issues for TGB 1.7.4.

I'm not quite at the compatibility test phase for my game yet, but if it isn't a resource by the time I get to it I'll be doing all in my power to fix it (or my game won't ship!).

Here's hoping the solutions aren't too hairy.

-Tim

#7 Hi,

I just saw this thread.
Did you guys managed to find a solution for the Windows7 problems ?

thansk,
Bruno

#8 Unfortunately not yet. We also hope that someday someone from GaragaGames would spot this topic and would say something. All in all it's their engine not being compatible with two windows version at the moment (did you now that Vista is 4 years old now?)

Of course as soon as we would figure out solution we would post it on forums.

Cheers.

#9 It is compatible with both but it does not handle "forcefully destroy the OGL context" situations (what happens on ctrl-alt-del, screensaver, ...)

As OGL isn't managed by some central place like DX, its required to fully recreate all from scratch which to my knowledge does not happen in either TGE nor TGB.

Before Vista that already happened, its actually a problem that existed since Win2k, but up to Vista most had the "home user" versions, not Pro upwards and the Admin Window was / is a Pro+ thing.

#10 Our testing just revealed this problem with Windows 7 too. We are using the fixes for the Vista equivalent of this bug, so I can confirm that they don't help.

#11 I'm just going to paste the relevant portion of the bug report:

Quote:Windows 7 was the most likely to have infrastructural issues with how the game handled OS-based actions. If the game was selected in the Task Bar (by clicking on the TGB icon) it would give two errors. One would note that ‘Failed to open “main.cs”.’ with only an okay button, and after dismissing that one another is shown which says ‘Failed to initialize game, shutting down.’ Despite the second message, the game continues to play.

As well, if the game was returned to via Alt-Tab, it would cause a crash (this was also observed in Vista).

#12 Ah: apparently we made a mistake in the Vista alt-tab fix, so it wasn't actually working. We'll have to test with Win7 again.

#13 I've only just installed Windows 7 on one machine, but it sounds like the "Failed to open main.cs" problem is just a shortcut problem. Make sure your run directory is set to your install directory on all shortcuts.

#14 Man, talk about a thread that really takes the wind out of your sails. Is there any kind of official announcement somewhere that development / fixes on the 1.7.4 line has totally stopped? It seems that Vista / Windows 7 compatibility would be at the top of any TODO list.

#15 Its likely/hopefully adressed in Torque 2D (be it only through the fact that it has a modern DX9 based renderer, not a OpenGL to DX call alias system as TGE / TGB) where the renderer and code architecture have been significantly modernized and can be much better maintained to adress this kind of issues.


TGB is basically EOL (TGE has been out of support since 1.5.2)
Even without it beeing EOL I doubt its possible to fix it within that environment as TGEs architecture on the graphics end is not flexible and is much much older than Vista and comes from a time when the admin screen that scraps the whole rendering context did not exist. Different DPI did not exist either and I'm actually not sure if this might not even be an issue caused by the OpenGL drivers

#16 This is a bit odd for a company to make previous product EOL when the next product is not yet finished. How can we trust that this story won't repeat itself when Torque2D will meet it's age? A game engine is a long-living product, especially in the casual market...

Anyway, it *is* possible to fix TGB to work properly on Vista (we did that), so I suppose it is still possible to solve the DPI problem and make it working on Win7, too. This is sad though that Torque team doesn't support products that it still does sell :/

#17 @World-Loom - I completely agree... if TGB had one more release that made it Windows 7 compatible, it would give folks much more time to shift over to T2D as I hear its not backward compatible at all.

#18 Well we could stop selling TGB if that would make things better for you? *cheap sarcasm*

If anyone knows how to make TGE v1.5 (non of the compatibility issues are actually anything to do with TGB) completely compatible with Vista and Windows 7 then drop me a line. If you've got those fixes and they've been through any professional QA then again let me know.

At some point we had to stop work on TGB to start on the new Torque 2D because there are only a few of us.

#19 I found a Vista fix that I was going to post later this week that worked for all combinations of Alt-Enter, Alt-Tab, Ctrl-Alt-Del, etc. I'm going to test it on Windows 7 tonight. I'll post up my changes as soon as possible.

#20 @Melv, I completely understand what you are saying as I've been in similar situations in my non-game related jobs, but to World-Loom's point I would think that bug fixes would get made until the new version is out. At this point we are in a sort of engine limbo where we can't get things to work in the old version and the new version wont be available for some time... into the source code we go I guess.

@William, if you find something that works for W7 I am definitely interested