Eldorado.Railroad, on 27 December 2023 - 09:40 AM, said:
We do not know what operating system people use with Open Rails. We only know the version number of Open Rails itself from the update checks, and we'll not be adding anything else to them.
You might have seen OS or geo data for downloads from Google Analytics on the website. I can't think where else it would have come from.
Eldorado.Railroad, on 27 December 2023 - 09:40 AM, said:
All the code will be public, including the server-side collection service, but none of that has been written yet. The domain will be "telemetry.openrails.org" to keep it separate from everything else.
Eldorado.Railroad, on 27 December 2023 - 09:40 AM, said:
Unless you have disabled the update checks, you're already providing your IP address, as it is inescapable when communicating over the internet. We only use it to count unique users, however, and have not geo-located anyone with it.
We will be taking extra steps (now documented in the OP) to prevent linking your IP address with your telemetry data, should you choose to opt-in.
Eldorado.Railroad, on 27 December 2023 - 09:40 AM, said:
Windows 7 is the limiting factor for a few things people would like to do, like upgrade the version of .NET, but ORMT is not aware of a compelling reason to drop it for now.
Instead, we're more interested in the Direct3D Feature Level minimum being increased from 9_1 to 10_0.
Eldorado.Railroad, on 27 December 2023 - 09:40 AM, said:
All code for collection will be public (inside Open Rails itself as usual), as will the telemetry collection and processing webapp. As will be clear from the code (once it is written), the data is identical to the top of a log file (minus the date/time).
Likewise, the processing and analysis of the data will be public (inside the webapp).
However, the raw data is not going to be public, since there is still a chance that it may uniquely identify users. We won't know if this is the case until we actually collect the data, though, but we don't want to accidentally reveal something by starting off with all data being public.
Eldorado.Railroad, on 27 December 2023 - 09:40 AM, said:
Unfortunately, it appears impossible to provide glTF support (which would provide a huge upgrade in graphics for new content) without also dropping the DirectX 9-level hardware. The graphical updates are desperately needed as shown elsewhere in this forum.
There is no need to drop Windows 7 for glTF, though, and since Direct3D Feature Level 10_0 graphics card started 2006-2008 (a few years before Windows 7 in 2009) I am hopeful that everyone on Windows 7 will already have a 10_0-capable graphics card.