Quote Originally Posted by Yshnal View Post
So, are you saying that each and every one of the games that have been released recently (many of which were developed with Win7+ in mind, not Vista) have gone out of their way to fix this? Because they all work fine.

It seems more likely that SE is using an old (and buggy/unsupported) implementation for their mouse pointer rendering.
SE took some cues from XI's mouse cursor problems and also incorporated a means to toggle mouse rendering into XIV, then took it a way for some reason. There was nearly a year of work by the community trying to bring back the debug hardware and debug software cursor features because the problem still persisted. Being able to select one option over the other gave them some form of remedy, even if not a perfect one. Some guys found ways to keep bringing it back (several tools to patch the .exe after each beta came out, and there was a new Windower project as well)--but all that went away when the game went offline for the revamp. Haven't noticed anyone else finding and working with the debug modes in 2.0 yet... but, then again I haven't been active in those channels since I left XI either.

Who knows why the option never got fully implemented back into 2.0... perhaps SE just gave up on it since they were planning to move to a higher feature level already. Maybe they were also hoping Vista would fall off the map when Microsoft started phasing out production in 2010 and they weren't expecting to have to deal with it at all in 2.0. But, because it is a problem with the game's current DirectX feature level not behaving properly in Vista, those Vista specific problems will likely persist until SE moves off of the legacy crap and delivers the promised DirectX update.

In a way, you answered your own question. XIV was built with strong XP support initially, then later unofficially supported with the 2.0 rebuild. But it still runs fine in XP... because it's a DX9c game. Vista has always been known to be spotty with pure DX9 stuff because of Microsoft's 10 to 9 emulation crap. Much of this was worked out in DX11 and the Win7 unified drivers and such, and polished further with Win8--but Microsoft and the vendors never retrofitted Vista with the changes. They had a pseudo retro update to incorporate some Win7 enhancements to Vista, but some core stuff still remains borked. Mouse issues is one of them. Other games/apps that also had strong roots in legacy DirectX had/have issues tied to those DX9 throwbacks as well (not limited to just mouse cursor)...even Diablo3 was plagued with mouse cursor issues because of it's DX9 support.

Games/apps that are built solely with Vista/W7/W8 in mind don't fall into the same traps simply because they aren't dependent on those legacy feature flags. No issues with 10_9 or 9_x feature level emulations b/c the base DX will always be straight DX10 or higher. But... if they are building to support XP, they HAVE to write code that uses DX9 directly (not 10_9 or 9_x thunking, but the actual DX9 because XP caps at DX9). There is no DX10 for XP, so you have to code specifically to DX9 to support XP. This poses a problem because then you have to make a decision... make a pure DX9c game and hope it gets along with newer OS's and their DX9 emulation engines/drivers, or incorporate alternate updated coding and an installer to detect/apply the proper version(s) of the game so you can more properly support the native DX level of each of the targeted OS's. It might even result in multiple versions of the game, more or less. So, then you have the complications of on-going support--the logistics of it all can be a bit more than some companies want to invest in (think about XI and the whole PS2/PS3/XB360/PC mess...once bitten, twice shy perhaps?)

In this case, you had a locked native DX9 XP environment in play (XP can't take DX10). Then your Vista starts at DX10, gets DX11 updates and poorly emulates previous DX feature levels not native to the OS. Then finally, you get Win7/win8 with DX11 as their bases, which thunks back to lower feature levels far better than Vista ever could. The game started with DX9 for the XP support... and is STILL DX9 even after the 2.0 rebuild. In Vista, pure DX9 is still handled poorly, and in Win7/8 it's run with far better emulation support.

That's pretty much the long and short of it. Until SE cranks out something along the lines of a DX11 version (or at least a strong DX10 level version) working towards fully locking out XP, Vista is potentially going to be problematic because of fundamental issues with it's DX9 emulation.


New hardware coming out in the coming months and getting demoed at the electronic shows, which means potential price drops on new hardware. Tax Season is around the corner, so people may get to take advantage of some inventory reduction sales (provided people get decent refunds this year). XP End of Life is April, Vista already slated for 2017, and prices aren't that bad for migrating if you plan to install on a current system either. You can already nab Win7/8 for less than $90 online, depending on version (got a sealed win8 Upgrade box for $75 from Canada). Microsoft has a program to get Win8 to students for $70. Not unreasonable to expect more people to begin migrating soon.

Who knows.. maybe SE will do the big upgrade sooner than we expect. Just hope it doesn't go the way of XI's track record.