32bit players

Hello!
I’m thinking about make computer game and I’m Blender user. But many people in my country still use Win XP 32 bit or other 32 bit systems. Could i make game in Armory 3d for 32 bit systems if no 32 bit version of engine is available? Which is the oldest system supported by Armory?
Sorry for my bad English.

Hi!

It should be doable but Windows XP may be a little tricky. If you select the Windows (C) target in Armory Exporter and build, you will get Visual Studio project files. You can then select x86 platform in Visual Studio and Microsoft provides a documentation on how to compile for the Windows XP:

Yes, remember that Armory generates a Haxe project, and then from this Haxe generates a project for the native development environment. The final steps are carried out in native compiler tools.

This means that there are three complex pieces of software which all have to be marching to the same drummer. (“Patience is a virtue.”) :smiley:

You first need to ensure that Haxe is being invoked with the proper compiler options so that it will generate proper output, then the compiler settings. It’s a good eye to “eyeball” the generated source-code to be sure that it’s what you expected it to be. (I’ve found that the best way to check that the Haxe settings are in good order is to look at what it generated, look for things that seem wrong or not as you want them to be, and work backwards to find out why.)


Edited based on subsequent comments – thanks.

That’s not true, Haxe can not create Visual Studio projects. Kha handles that (when you use Haxe without Kha, you compile your projects on the command line and to debug projects you have to drag your files into VS one by one to set breakpoints). Also please ignore everything Mike said about proper compiler options, Kha also takes care of “int size and so-on”.
That aside, yes, Windows XP is in theory supported by just setting the option in Visual Studio (but hang on to VS2017 because Microsoft removed that option in VS2019), even the Direct3D9 backend still exists (but for Armory you should go with the OpenGL backend instead). But in practice you will likely run into trouble because I think nobody actively tests old GPUs and old Windows XP graphics drivers with Armory or Kha (I know I don’t).

2 Likes

Edited the above post based on these comments – thanks for the corrections, Rob.

There’s no question that “it’s [at least] a 64-bit world now,” and I mostly see 32-bit environments in places like hospitals where this-or-that piece of medical equipment still runs the software under which it was certified. (And probably will, for a very long time to come.) But I’d really question how many people are still running 32-bit-only equipment in their homes, or to play games. The greater memory capacity of the newer chips, alone, is a pretty enormous reason for just letting the old motherboards go, along with the operating-system versions that went with them.

1 Like

There’s still a lot of 32bit Window XP in for example China I think and that’s super interesting and I’d love to support it. It’s hard for something graphically very advanced like Armory though, in particular because I don’t have old hardware around to actually test things so when problems come up I depend on good bug reports.