I've done hardly any game development in my life (making a simple Gamemaker game at high-school in 2016 or 17, & making a box fall in Unity a couple years back; so you can call me a complete noob. But I was just wondering: If I for whatever reason wanted to make my game work natively on a Bunch of different Windows versions, like 95, 98, 98SE, 2000, ME, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10 & 11; would that be possible without making separate versions of the game for different Windows versions? It sounds like a cool project for doing just for the fun of it, for learning about the different OS versions once I already have more experience with development on modern Windows. What if I made the game on Godot game engine? Can Godot games even run on such old operating systems? I heard that Windows 2000 and above are NT based, and major Windows versions prior to that ran on something else: would this greatly affect the development process at all?

Clarification: Sorry, but I should have clarified that my development platform is Linux, and would be porting to Windows, which obviously should change the answer to my question drastically; I have no idea why I worded things to sound like I would develop the game on Windows first and foremost; but that was my mistake.

  • recursive_recursion [they/them]@programming.dev
    ·
    1 year ago

    I'd imagine you'd need to create the game in assembly to make it work on all versions of Windows, this is only a guess though

    • also not sure about Godot as it's still relatively new in comparison to other game engines and programming languages(GDScript)

    Edit: even if Godot was a mature game engine at this point in time it'd be more likely that improvements to the engine would be forward facing and thus be unlikely to work for previous versions of Windows(this is only an educated guess)

    <br>

    Your idea is more feasible on Linux(+Godot) due to Flatpaks(and Flathub)

    • most suitable for forwards compatibility
      • unsure about backwards compatibility (previous Linux versions) due to requiring distro level support
    • DreitonLullaby@lemm.ee
      ·
      1 year ago

      Thanks. Although I don't get your point on using Linux; because, why would I develop a Windows game on Linux? And Flatpaks are a Linux specific package (I know because I daily drive Manjaro). So... why would Flatpaks make my idea more feasible if they can't be used on Windows?

      Could somebody tell me why this comment has so many downvotes, please? What makes this bad advice for me?

      • recursive_recursion [they/them]@programming.dev
        ·
        1 year ago

        ah I meant that Linux games would be easier to create for multiple versions since packaging into a Flatpak once would let you distribute it to multiple platforms/distros all at once

        the downvotes are probably from me giving tangent advice rather than one that's parallel to your goal(Windows)