Usher in the 3rd era of RTS!

http://www.littletinyfrogs.com/article/ ... re_waiting

=P

This actually begs the question- is PA going to support 32bit?

I'm sure this was mentioned, but will it support 64-bit? I would hope that Uber would optimize 64 over 32. It would disappoint me if my 8 GB wasn't being used.

I also agree with everything in that article. +1'd

I'd have to find Neutrino's post, but we've said we'll support 32-bit and 64-bit, but we strongly recommend people run in 64-bit. The addressable memory limitations in 32-bit are already well past being a serious limit to what can be accomplished. I don't recall the exact details of what 32-bit will be limited on, but if I had to guess, unit caps will likely be the first ceiling you bump against.

Hopefully Sorian or Neutrino or someone a bit more technical will poke into the thread and provide an engineers answer to the question.

I'd love to hear it. Honestly, what percent of your market runs 32bit these days?

64 Bit and lots of Ram is a Problem? Really? I would think that anybody who plays games these days will either already have x64 and lots of Ram or will be able to just upgrade. Ram is cheap.

I disagree on the idea that DX10 is required to make a good 3rd gen RTS. PA won't even use DX at all. I don't think a good RTS needs fully realistic graphics anyway.

I'd be interested to know at what amount of RAM we would stop seeing benefits? What's the maximum amount it would be worth us having or upgrading too?

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey#cat0

67% are running 64 bit if you count only Win 7 64 and Win 8.

DX11 is comparable with the latest version of openGL if I am correct, however most gamers know what directX is, openGL, a lot less people will know, or think of games that use old versions of openGL.

DX9 supports vertex shaders, I think (shader model 3.0) DX11 can do more fancy stuff like tesselation (shader model 5.0) DX10 is left alone by most developers for some reason.

I think I read somewhere PA will require at least 3.0 support from your video card. I guess this is because of the amount of texture samplers they want to use in their shaders.

I could write a novel about this (and with all the posts I made I kind of have).

I typically use the Steam hardware numbers as a rough guide to the market. According to that we still need 32-bit support. I would *love* to drop it but from a market perspective it seems like a bad idea.

To play the truly large games in PA you will need to run a 64-bit server. In most cases a 32-bit client would work ok in these games because the client only sees a subset of the world at any one time. We can do things like limit texture sizes, throw away data we don't need and generally try to live within the 32-bit world in these cases. It's not entirely clear where the limits lie but you will definitely be able to play 32-bit in most cases. I can envision games that don't work in 32-bit at all though...

That being said please please upgrade to 64-bit. There is simply no reason to be running 32-bit windows at this point.

It's because I want to make vertex texture fetch a min spec requirement. This allows us to use textures to instance animation data and draw a lot of units at one time with most of the animation work happening on the GPU.

thanks for letting me know I am currently researching shader language a bit, I may look in to that and see if that could be useful for my own project as well.

You can start here http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGem ... _ch02.html

I understand the difficulty of selecting between backwards compatibility and future-proofing. But backwards compatibility has a shelf life, and future proofing is betting on success in the future.

It seems to me that 32 bit support is not as significant as even the quite low numbers posted on various sources (30%? 40% at most?) since that number is only ever going to drop. In fact, hardware and operating system companies are always going to push the next gen as hard as possible. The days of 32 bit systems are numbered.

In fact the switch has already mostly happened industry-side, and among enterprise and higher-end consumers. The only holdouts are people who basically never buy computers. And even they might be forced to upgrade as software gets developed for 64 bit- especially Windows.

From a maximum market capitalization perspective right now, it does still make sense to support 32 bit. However in 6 months to a year, or perhaps two years, I highly doubt 32 bit is even going to exist in any significant capacity.

Perhaps Microsoft will screw their head on straight with Windows 9.

They may also make it 64-bit only. That would help a lot.

As an aside point: Frame-rate meters are not uncommon in games now. I've seen several that throw in memory usage too.

Would it be an okay idea to expose how much memory has been allocated to the UI? Those that play in 32b mode could then get a warning of how soon they're going to run into trouble that way.

You don't lock yourself out of one third of the market without very good cause.
We're stuck with 32-bitters for a while yet.

Even if it is one third now, the game isn't going to be out for about six months. And I think PA won't really hit its golden age until well after launch, the way TA didn't reach its peak until years after the initial launch of the game. In a very long, protracted golden age extended by the community and modders.

You might even say TA has had a golden age since, oh, about 2000, due to community mega mods, and then creation of Spring to make a more modern engine... to play Balanced Annihilation (essentially OTA). And that has even continued on since then. Now, 16 years later we have multiple highly evolved variants of TA, including including Zero K. The lineage to TA is extremely clear.

Imagine if Cavedog hadn't disappeared. Now suppose Uber may be able to learn from Cavedog and make the same rocket-fuel grade kickass game, and then benefit from the long tail in a way Cavedog failed.

In my opinion, 32 bit is small potatoes for the first six months to a year after PA's launch, at the outside.

as a completely uninformed geuss, so feel free to provide accurate figures as i couldnt find any, a good 50% of total game sales will be in the first 6 months post release, when the price is highest, interest is highest and so profit is highest - there is a rapid turn arround of games for sale these days and people rarely say to me "hey you should get this game from 12 months ago" as there is always a more modern version of most game genres. to exclude 30-40% of the customers would be a poor choice. in a global downturn you cant expect everyone to be upgrading to the latest tech, a pc is a nessity in life, but a good pc is a luxuary, especially with the quality of current consoles. the later 50% sales come over a much longer period for a much lower purchasing price, so less profit. Having a large audience at launch is essential to the longevity of the multiplayer too.

PA may buck the trend slighty due to concept and the distinct lack of good RTS games of late, but why take the gamble.

Maybe the expansion pack could have 64-bit as minspec.