It'd be nice, but without the API situation changing it's still unlikely. Vulkan is good, but the lack of documentation, the complexity, and lack of major support network doesn't do much to get people using it. And OpenGL blows.

Your mind is filled with the intellectual effluent of a dead, decaying species.

You need colonic irrigation, post-haste; or at the very least, suck on a urinal mint. ;p

compatibility with old, obsolete operating systems will always break at some point. You won't avoid that.
Just look at the installer that GOG is using (innosetup). They dropped Win9X support quite a few years ago, so there is a good chance you can't just take a pre-2000 game from your GOG shelf and run it in its original environment.
And as we move forward support for Win2000, WinXP ... Vista will drop eventually.
The software landscape is not a static still frame, it's always progressing.
It is simply unreasonable to expect developers to keep all that legacy code for ancient operating systems around forever. It is wouldn't be a healthy development model.
If you insist on staying in your little time capsule, refusing to update along with the rest of the world, fine that's your choice. But it's unfair to expect other people to invest time and effort to keep things running for you.

Steam has the advantage that it was developed at a time when Windows XP was the main target. Since then it has all the necessary code to support it.
The Galaxy Client and API was developed at a time when Windows XP was basically already dead. Dropping XP support and avoid wasting hours spent on ensuring things work on that old platform is more than reasonable. Especially if you look at the limited resources and already hefty delays in the development process.

I have a hard time blaming GOG for their choice here.

How is humanity going to fix the frightful mess it's made in this world when so many people like you mindlessly cling to the status quo?

I'd worry about the log in your own eye, if I was you, rather than the splinter in someone else's.

you're right about that but in the end it's just a temporaly problem. sooner or later you will need to change your hardware and you can still play your old version (you don't need the gog version right now but, in the future, it is better if they support modern OS).

Yes mandatory gog galaxy sucks I agree, and gog is pushing it already too much for me. But support both modern and old system is not easy and I prefer a good support for modern OS.

And if they work on wine I'm sure it's future proof.

Thanks for the reply and the constructive arguments.

The only point of difference is that still XP users don't expect from GOG or any other service to consume resources on supporting XP (and any other Windows version after EOL).

Since Galaxy client is meant to be optional, there could be better ways to add it to games sold here. Breaking working software by injecting optional dependencies is not necessary and doesn't feel right.

Of course, GOG will do what they feel good for them and customers will respond according to their views on that.

I'm not sure that anyone really knows the impact of breaking XP compatibility though. I think that only a minimum percentage of XP installations may be calculated. Since official XP support ended on April 8, 2014, there could be an arbitrary number of absolutely offline installations, which are beyond statistics. This applies to my XP machine too.

I'm a FreeBSD (and secondly Linux) user by the way.

But those technique wouldn't make sense here, most of the other technique are intrusive, can causes instability, while simply replacing a DLL is easy, fast and relatively safe, easy to roll back, and doesn't risk being detected by overzealous anti-virus as being suspicious.

But like I said earlier the base of this method of injection is to use the same name than the DLL you are trying to "inject" yourself into; if you want to incertept Direct X calls you call your DLL d3d.dll and put it in the game folder, if you want to intercept Steam calls you name your DLL steam_api.dll and put in in the game folder.

But here, apparently, the game load galaxywrp.dll directly and not steam_api.dll

Let's get back to reality for a second here, we are talking about a recent game where the company who created it is still around, we are not talking about a old games where the source code is lost in the void for many years.

There is no need for them to use any crack, to do any weird "fiddling" with the executable; they just have to ask Bethesda to provide them with an exe that will works outside of Steam.

Most likely that galaxywrp.dll is an in-place replacement for steam_api.dll, so games that only implement very basic achievements and don't need any other features of Galaxy can use it.

Why would it be their responsibility to maintain compatibility with OS they said the no longer support ?

Gee I'm soooooo sorry for pointing out how his list was flawed. /s

Have fun with your precious XP, at least until the hardware that actually supports it finally keels over.

Personally? I'll be enjoying having my games preserved for actual use on modern hardware and OSs.

I gave my XP box away a few years back. I just hate to see people getting dogpiled because they're doing things a little bit differently.

There are more than one dll injection techniques and it's obvious they have loaded the galaxywrp.dll, which has a different name than the steam one. This is a fact.

I don't think they have patched the executable in this specific case either, but it may be done if needed.

Injecting libraries during runtime may be intrusive and cause alarms. What I think they have done is utilizing the registry. GOG installer is signed and all settings will be made smoothly. I don't own New Vegas to elaborate more on this, so we may only make assumptions on the technique used, which is not really constructive.

By maintain compatibility, I mean don't break, not support. But you're right, I should have expressed it better. Logically GOG would be interested in more purchases, even if users will be on their own in case of ploblems.

XP users that connect to the internet do have an impact on the greater 'security' situation of the internet. Those machines are hugely vulnerable.

And if you go back and look at where I said Klumpen's list is crap, maybe just maybe you'd figure out why I said it was crap. His source of "XP supported" games is just a handful of games on Steam that 'might' run under XP, but the Steam DRM is going to ensure for at least some of those titles that said XP machine HAS TO CONNECT TO THE INTERNET.

It's not dogpiling for the sake of dogpiling, XP seriously needs to be put out of it's misery at this point. The ideals behind clinging to XP are the exact opposite to the ideals driving Linux development.

That's the thing, the fact that is load galawwrp.dll instead of steam_api.dll means that it's unlikely that it is dll injection.

If it was DLL injection then their DLL would be called steam_api instead or it would require creating a external EXE loader that would load the original EXE while injecting their own DLL, but the later would be an overkill when the devs of the game are still around.

If they used the registry then it would mean that they would have broken WinXP compatibility for... everything ;-) .

DLL injection using the registry means that your DLL is loaded for every single user process, if they did that it would mean that the galaxywrp.dll would be loaded every-time you start a new process.

Also if my memory is correct that feature is now disabled by default under Windows 10 because of the obvious security risk.

well, you'll notice that "galaxywrp.dll" has the same number of characters as "steam_api.dll".
So it would be very easy to simply hex edit the import descriptor from the exe to load galaxywrp.dll instead of steam_api.dll. ( Zero out the header entry pointing to the PE signature if necessary. )
That's done in a few minutes. (and i'd say you can still call it DLL injection)
It probably takes a lot longer to convince Bethesda to spend any effort on this.
I wouldn't be surprised if Bethesda just dumped the steam build on GOG..
They always rely on modders to fix their stuff, don't they :p

not sure though why it even matters how it was done.

Totally and seriously not trolling you like I usually do about your choice of OS, you DO realize that GOG has dropped official support for XP because they don't have anymore XP machines, right? They can't help you troubleshoot or offer solutions because they can't verify anything anymore. It's not that any game that suddenly loses the XP in "Required OS" is no longer compatible with XP, it's that they can't offer you a refund if it doesn't work in XP because they can't work to solve XP problems anymore. It's more covering their ass from having to give refunds wherein they can't verify and fix the problem. The ONLY game so far that was broken due to this is New Vegas, and that should be getting an update to fix it. They will never come out and say a game will work on XP since there are too many variables in a system with hardware and software configurations that they can't troubleshoot at all.

It's possible and I mentioned it in a previous post but it seems like an overkill, they could just have rename the dll to steam_api.dll and call it a day.