Technical question (64bit, dx10/11 and MT)

Our GalCiv AIs are always multithreaded.  In fact, Galactic Civilizations for OS/2 was the first computer game with a multithreaded AI.

Hey awesome, can't wait to put my hand on the alpha

Thank you for making this 64bit only. 

Yes thanks! AWESOME.. WIN7PRO 64 GOG OGOGOGOGGOGOGO

I hope you don't make my Nvidia 680 melt

Don't worry.  You'll have 2^64 seconds to upgrade your hardware to something that won't melt when the game comes out.

As early 64bit adopter since the first Athlon 64 came out ten years ago. Finally I can say thank you to a game developer for making a game that requires 64bit on the PC platform.

Yup, It took them some time (game developers) to notice the 64bit on PC's

Stardock have been one of the few to try to use tech to all its capacity in previous games so I'm really excited to see what kid of deviousness and epicness they come up with for GC3 with it being 64 bit and Dx10+.  I'd also say it's about time that SOMEONE started doing 64bit only.  I've seen one other game mentioned recently that's also going to be 64bit required.  There must be others but I follow a lot of gaming sites/news and don't recall seeing them.

I've been playing GC2 the past few days and currently on an immense map with 9 AIs and even mid/late game the turns are nearly instant.  Having a beefy gaming PC helps, I'm sure, but a lot of it is how well the game is coded (since I certainly have noticeably longer turns in other similar games).

Peculiarly though the recent BF4 beta was 64-bit only. Even though the retail release will have both 32/64 bit binaries.

32-bit is easiest to develop for, 64-biters used to be a miniority. Not anymore, so they wanted to see what they could do with max everything.

Last but no means least ..... Microsoft have canned XP - and XP developers now get zero MS support.

It therefore takes a particular kind of Lunatic to develop and release a mainstream game that purports to be supported by XP. Having canned XP, it becomes insane to support 32Bit.

Brad maybe a controversial in some peoples eyes - but stupid he is not.

haha you guys are making me more confident about my own 64bits/Dx10 only requirement for my game

It's largely a result of Consoles that have held back 64bit adoption in gaming (and heck DirectX adoption beyond 9).  Since the Xbox360 and PS3 were essentially 32bit DirectX 9 boxes and developers tended to want to at least leave the option for a console port (who am I kidding, most top tier games were developed on consoles first then ported to PC in recent years) that's been the glass ceiling for PCs.  Since both the PS4 and Xbone are 64bit loads of RAM I'd suspect we're going to see a lot of 64bit DX11 games in 2014 and by 2015 it may be difficult to find any top tier releases that support 32bit at all.

Yeah I'm glad it's 64 bit and happy it's DX11.. I hate the limits to modding that 32bit games impose... my skyrim would be rock stable if it were 64bit... atm I've got to watch that 2.8 of 8 GB RAM level hits to high and crash... It's hilarious considering my Video Card has 2 GB of GDDR5 on it... And yes it's those pathetic consoles holding the industry back... Glad they've finally decided to up their game a bit by going DX11, X64, with 8GB+ of RAM on XBox 1, PS4

I'm wondering what Brad's thoughts are on Mantle.

I am also looking forward to the possibilities that can come of a true 64 bit dx11 game/graphics, I honestly do not know how long I am going to able to hold out. I found myself hoping to hear a just joking, it is coming out tomorrow from our good friends at Stardock.

This game has me chomping at the bit and I for one am glad my quad core 64 bit processor will finally get the ability to stretch its 64 bit code muscles.

Heads down brilliant code guys... we want to see some results

WOO HOO

Chris Robert's Star Citizen was announced last year and it is a 64bit only game running Frostbite 3 engine.

Minimum requirements (for alpha)

Windows 7 or 8 64-bit

Dual Core CPU Intel: Core2 Duo 2.4Ghz

AMD: Phenom X2 8GB of RAM

NVidia Geforce 460GTX AMD

Radeon HD5850

DirectX 11

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

About 70% of Steam users have a 64 bit OS (Vista 4.47% /Win7 51.41% /Win8 15%)

Stats from Steam definitely indicate that going 64 bit is the way to go, if you have a good technical reason for it.

Yeah I'm looking at this survey everytime it's updated. There is still an important 32bits minority but I would guess that by the time my game is out (and GC3) this minority will be negligable.

The best reason beside more addressable memory is to avoid having to maintain two different builds and making save-game/network compatible between the 2. It frees up more time for the more important things like making the game more awesome

Well I was more referring to would your program actually benefit from a 64 bit architecture that warrants leaving out the 32bit crowd? Is it using gobs of memory because it has to, or because you expect your audience to use mods that would stretch the limit of the game? Or is it doing it because you didn't really optimize the program well.

If it's the former, awesome go for it. If ti's the latter... well maybe not so much

BTW your game looks pretty awesome. Keep up the good work

@satoru1: I don't think it's very hard today to use more than 2gb ram for textures and models. Especially if you want to keep them in RAM instead of loading from a HDD when the user zooms in to a planet or something. That and one always could use a lot pre-calculated lookup tables for AI and other purposes.

Why waste the ram when there is some? If the data is same, you'll just end up using complex systems and those are opposite to the "optimiziations".

Deep Space Settlement can scale up to huge galaxies with loads of units. All of these need more memory as the player sets the universe bigger. It works perfectly fine on a 32bits architecture but 64 > 32. Mods is a big unknown, it's one of my priority to bring support to modders and allow them to secure enough resources for their creations. As for optimization, there is the old speed versus memory delimma that sudenlty swing in favor of speed. So it all comes down to bigger, better, faster. ~More than ever hours after our work is never over~~~ -Darf Punk

Thanks! I'm doing it for the love of the genre! <3

And which game is that ?

(Sorry if I missed some obvious information. I have only very recently arrived on the GalCiv III forum.)

There is an embedded link at the start of para 1 to that post

Thank you. I must be old & blind : it took me some time to figure out that one had to click on the word "game".

[Between my very first post on the GalCiv III forum (reply #23) and this post, I went to the Stardock Store and pre-ordered the Founder edition.]