Just wanted to report that, under Windows 11, the game crashes once the player attempts to leave the first character's house. The issue seems to be due to the game defaulting to using DirectSound instead of XAudio. While the game, thankfully, has an external configuration file which can be modified to change this and fix the issue, given the lowest OS the game supports is Windows 7, I feel XAudio should be made the game's default audio driver. All supported Windows OSes natively support XAudio, and using it will prevent future issues stemming from sound drivers - if not Windows support - slowly removing or screwing up support for DirectSound features and functionality.
This is going to show my nerdiness, but judging from the default application icon for the game demo, I'm assuming you're using GameMaker? If so, it handily includes a function which tells you exactly what OS the game is running on.
Otherwise, I'm gonna have to go with a generic suggestion and say the Windows SDK does include a way to detect what OS version the game is being run under, which works as far back as Windows XP and as current as Windows 10 and beyond (at least according to the most current documentation I can find).
Hope that helps!
No, no game maker here. This is a completely custom engine written from scratch. It's actually quite nice and powerful, more like Unity but for pixel art games. It's done completely with pure c++ and hot-reloading for everything with a minimal set of dependencies which suits me nice, no dependency on any third party engine that breaks the game.
Someday I will probably open source it.
Detecting is not really the main issue, it's that I don't have Windows 7 around to test it :) But it sounds like XAudio is the way to go. It's much more performant anyway and I would want it to be the default.