In April, Microsoft announced that Windows XP had reached the end of its life and would no longer receive support, nor would it continue to be updated to patch vulnerabilities and stability issues.Windows XP was first released in August 2001 and is now nearly 13 years old. With that, XP is simply too old to continue to support. Therefore, the VC:MP and LU development teams are considering dropping support for Windows XP due to the benefits of doing so.By dropping XP support, we can use more recently released compilers and development toolkits that support various optimizations that would have performance benefits. Moreover, because no development is done on Windows XP, and is now largely done on Windows 7 or Windows 8/8.1 machines, we will be able to better diagnose and resolve issues that users may be having. We can also use newer APIs available in Windows Vista and above that do not exist in XP.These are not the only reasons for us to drop support for XP, but they are significant reasons. However, we would like to make sure that the community we're developing for will not be largely affected by such a move; if many players are still on Windows XP, we will indefinitely postpone any plans to phase out support for it. Otherwise, we will continue to do so.To help us better understand how many players would be affected by the withdrawal of support for Windows XP, please answer the poll above.
