W10 pro vs W11 free

[jules]

Excuse me if i am not convinced, i work a lot with CAD-Packages which have the same problem and can do it. I am not asking for backwards compatibility, but a transparent handling of versions. The way it is now I am not notified which format the file has that i open. It is obvious that saving in older formats will result in a certain loss of data since the featureset is not the same. The program then should issue a warning similar to the one existing.

I think when Dave said there was no way we could do it, he didn't mean that it was technically *impossible*.. obviously you *could* implement that, but it'd be very, very time-consuming and expensive for us to write and maintain. And considering that it appears nowhere on our list of top requested features, it's just not practical.

Sure, for a huge CAD company with 100 developers it's the kind of task they might give to a junior dev for a few months. Microsoft probably has a whole team working on MS Office document versions. But for our tiny dev team, it's just not feasible, I'm afraid!

[fde101]

This is one place that XML-based file formats do have a bit of an edge.

You code the product to ignore elements and attributes that it doesn't understand, and provide default values for attributes that are pulled from a set of options.

Then if a newer version of the product adds new elements or attributes, the older version ignores them but can still use the things it does understand.

If a newer version adds new options to a list, the older version sees a value it doesn't recognize and substitutes the default instead.

[jules]

Yep, and using XML has indeed been really helpful over tracktion's history for that reason. But over the last couple of years we made more fundamental changes to the overall structure that we store, which aren't just a case of adding/removing a few properties.