I’m currently trying to run Cesium for Unity on a machine with Windows 7, but it seems unsupported officially. I’ve checked the documentation and found that Cesium requires Windows 10 or newer, likely due to Unity version and system dependencies.
Unfortunately, upgrading to Windows 10 is not an option for this particular system at the moment (due to legacy software constraints). So I’m wondering:
Has anyone managed to get Cesium for Unity working on Windows 7?
Are there any workarounds, compatibility layers, or older Cesium versions that might still work on Win7?
Alternatively, is it possible to run the Cesium plugin in headless/server mode or with minimal graphics requirements?
Any help, experience, or creative workaround would be greatly appreciated!
Please see my answer here to a similar question regarding Cesium for Unreal:
We’ve never supported Windows 7 in any version of Cesium for Unity or Cesium for Unreal, as this OS was out of support before the very first release of either.
If you don’t need any graphics capabilities, you may want to take a look at Cesium Native, which is the low-level library underlying both products:
Really appreciate the clarity — it’s always nice to get official confirmation that something is completely unsupported. Saves a lot of trial and error… and a good deal of silent, misguided optimism.
After digging into the crash, I found that Cesium Native uses WinRT APIs — which of course are nowhere to be found on Windows 7. So that explains the spontaneous combustion.
Since modernizing the environment isn’t on the table, I tracked down a Windows Server 2012 machine (which somehow counts as “new” in this context), got Cesium working there, and started playing with render streaming, trying to pipe frames over to the Win7 box like it’s 1999 and VNC just got cool again.
Now I’m deep in WebRTC config hell on Server 2012 — because naturally, the fun never ends — but progress is progress. If I can’t bring the system forward, maybe I can just stream the future back to it.
Thanks again — it’s genuinely helpful to know where the boundaries are, even if we only learn them by crashing headfirst into them.
I’m actually surprised to hear we’re using WinRT APIs @jkldsajkdlsa, unless Visual Studio just does that “by default” these days? Do you have any more details on that?
In any case, cesium-native is pure standard C++ code, with very little dependency on any specific system capabilities. So I would hope that it wouldn’t be hard to get it running on most any system for which a working C++20 compiler is available.
Of course, that could just be some of that misguided optimism you mentioned. We’ve never tried it.
