So, on clicking "play" (just out of curiosity, I know the game won't be playable until tomorrow), it turns out that the game requires .NET framework 3.5 to run. While this isn't actually a problem in and of itself, I must admit it's a bit weird. I know the game has been in development for many years, but I would also expect the "background" tech to get updated along the way. It's not like it's difficult to rebuild an assembly for a higher .NET version, and having a dependency on such an outdated framework in a game released in 2020 seems... silly.

For reference, .NET 3.5 was released in November 2007. The current (and last) version of the framework is 4.8, released in April 2019.

With a game as demanding as Cyberpunk 2077 it seems like it would be a very good idea to make sure that the underlying technologies have been updated to take advantage of all the performance enhancements (as well as bug and security fixes) that have been made since development started.

As far as I know, .NET 3.5 has different libraries to 4.5+, so maybe there are some required libraries they couldn't escape from using.

Hello,

The .NET framework requirement is for the CyberPunk 2077 launcher (Labeled as: Cyberpunk2077.exe) we all have that just pops up the screen indicating that it is not the 10th yet. If you look inside that .exe you can see the image and can see that the file does not do much else. Hope this helps.



4K

I used to write C# code for a time so I'll pitch in here.

Security fixes in a single player game? How is it going to get hacked? :tilt:

The biggest thing of 3.x -> 4.x is the runtime went from a nice 20mb to a horrific 400mb+ for some "windows presentation framework" Microsoft wanted to push and then dropped on the floor. Most C# in gamedev is actually centered around Mono even.

There is a ".NET Core" now that they tried to release. I don't know where its gone. Being absorbed in to Mono last I ever saw it.

I'm honestly surprised to see Microsoft's .NET used at all.

For one thing, it apparently does communicate with something over the internet, since there seems to be some debacle going on about some DLC only working if you launch the game through Galaxy.

For another, some older frameworks have local security holes that other malicious software can take advantage of. It doesn't really matter what type of game it is, if it opens up your OS to attacks from the outside. For a game of this caliber? I guess. However, if, as 4K11R4 says it's the launcher that uses it, that makes somewhat more sense.

This is a non criticism. 1 There are very good reasons why 10+ year olds frameworks are kept in development, because perfectly fine and working elements that are not crucial parts of the engine have been developed for them, or because, it frankly does not matter, and the amount of time it would take to re-write the part of the engine that relies on 3.5 to make it 4.8 compatible in no way justifies the benefit gained (which is usually tiny) 2 the devs know 3.5 better 3 the industry knows 3.5 better 4 3.5 is more stable while 4.8 is still i process of being patched 5 you don't actually get any additional benefit from 4.8 so using it is pointless 6 3.5 is actually BETTER (shock and horror, but sometimes the older version is superior to the newer one, if not in terms of preformance, then in terms of elegance and clarity of the programming)
Also, and again - this is not a big deal, so why the devs would worry about this when they can spend that exact same time writing better Ray Tracing compatability...I am not sure.

It doesn't have to do anything with background tech or if it is up to date. Most likely this library was used for accessing some windows functionality, like writing and reading save files, getting path to user directory (to find where to store saves), and so on. So there is no need to worry about that. there is high chance, that pieces of code used in this case are just being copy-pasted and kept unchanged between versions of net framework, and there is no reason to spend programmer's time for updating the game code to use the newer version of framework just for the sake of it.

Caliber has nothing to do with it. It's about requirements and dependencies. You can't say that because a game is AAA there are some things it shouldn't be using, that's a bad viewpoint to have to say the least. Everything has pros and cons, which are evaluated before use. No-one in development just goes, "Oh, this is old, we're not ever going to use it because it's old." There are plenty of poor examples of modern technologies, too.

People think that because a game is AAA that its production will be some kind of ridiculous top-notch paradise of efficiency, "no expenses spared" NASA facility. The best companies are often very very dissapointing if you were to work at them - not because they do anything bad, but because a lot of things they do are very ordinary and pedestrian, and same as everybody else. A lot of problems go unsolved, a lot of deadwood accumulates, and needs to be every once in a while cleaned out, a lot of technology used is from 10 or 20 years ago. The stereotype of everything being spick and spam probably would only apply in some places like Google where they literally have trillions upon trillions of dollars to spend.

Hello,

I just looked into the .EXE again. It is internally labeled as the: " CPLauncher.exe " It's function calls seem to do things like set display resolution settings and such. My guess is that it is the front end that will work in tandem with the actual runtime executable.

As the game supports both Windows 7 and Windows 10 AND Microsoft's own literature states that a dev should use a launcher front end to determine the code path for the DX12 version to use; I would believe it is safe to say that the ACTUAL runtime .EXE has yet to be delivered. Just my thoughts.



4K

I cant install net framework, luckily its for launcher, right?

I completely agree.

I never said it "shouldn't" be using something. I was just wondering why it was using it, since I don't remember ever seeing any other game with this requirement.

In retrospect though, it's probably because I just built a new PC. My old one was about 10 years old, so any game needing .NET 3.5 would have had it already available with no need to install it. I was very much not aware of this. Honestly, it seems very uncharacteristic of Microsoft to do so, in my experience. I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that when you say "developer" you mean "game developer", because otherwise that is very very far from the truth.

FREE DOWNLOAD CYBERPUNK 2077
Why pay when you can play for free
www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbGPampDLIw

Just so you know. The game will have online features eventually.