Final AVWW System Requirements Updated

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Original: http://arcengames.blogspot.com/2012/04/final-avww-system-requirements-updated.html

Now that the game has been out in beta for months and months, we have the data to set our final system requirements.  Here they are:

COMPATIBLE OPERATING SYSTEMS
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Windows XP SP2 or later; Mac OSX Intel CPU and "Leopard" 10.5 or later.
Linux is not officially supported by Unity 3D, the engine AVWW runs on.  However, we have heard it works under WINE.

HARDWARE
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2 GB RAM
1.6Ghz CPU (more is recommended for multiplayer servers)
1 GB Hard Disk Space
800x600 or greater desktop screen resolution (1024x768 recommended)
Graphics card must support 1024x1024 textures (most 32MB and up graphics cards do).
Broadband Internet Connection or LAN required for multiplayer

You'll perhaps notice two changes: 

Operating System Changes
Previously we supported any version of Windows XP, but now you have to have XP SP2.

Also, we previously supported PowerPC and Mac OS X "Panther" 10.3.9.  Unfortunately, due to the Unity 3D engine removing support for those platforms, that means that we're unable to continue supporting those platforms if we ever want to update to a later version of the game.

We apologize if the PowerPC/Panther changes in particular causes any hardship for anyone.  But we suspect that the game would have run so poorly on that old of a computer anyhow that you wouldn't have liked the experience you got.

If anyone purchased the beta of game on the expectation of being able to play it solely on PowerPC and is now unable to do so, then please contact us and we'll be happy to offer a refund.  But we also highly recommend the newer Intel-based Macs; they're awesome, and speaking for myself personally I was able to get a used one two years ago for $600 off of eBay.

Last note: you can technically still play AVWW on the older operating systems at the moment, because we are still running Unity 3.3.  That is likely to still be the case at launch of 1.0, because we had lots of trouble with bugs in Unity 3.4 and we don't want to risk moving to Unity 3.5 right before a big release.  But at some point after AVWW 1.0 comes out, we will be upgrading the game engine to a newer version of Unity, and then the game literally won't run on the older OSes.

RAM Requirements
The other thing that we've learned through the beta testing is that 1 GB of RAM really isn't going to give a good experience for anyone.  Anyone already playing the game knows this, so I doubt this is going to impact anyone negatively.  But we've increased our minimum requirements from 1 GB with a 2GB recommendation, to a flat 2GB minimum.

And of course more is always better if you're on an OS that uses a lot of RAM (Vista / Win7) or if you've got a lot of background tasks sucking up RAM.  But even in those situations, so long as you haven't tweaked your windows settings to not have a swap/paging file, 2GB of RAM is plenty.

We've had a few beta players with only 2GB of RAM and a disabled swap/paging file that ran into occasional crashes due to lack of available memory, but simply re-enabling the swap/paging file (which is on by default in windows) solves the issue.


That's the news!