Initial Alpha access restricted to 64 bit OS

I'm so saving this image.

Include it in the game and I'll die a happy man!

I agree, KILL IT

Ok, firstly I'd like to say that my concerns here aren't really directed at Uber, or its employees. I guess it's more how I see human behaviour can be, especially from more immature consumers/gamers. There can definitely be a trend of demanding something for nothing, and ranting for the sake of ranting.

Do I think that this sort of behaviour will stop, no, I just hope it can be minimised. I would hate to see this game be destroyed by negative press/exposure, and I'm sure nobody here would want that. I mainly posted the previous response as Neutrino requested thoughts on what we thought about killing 32-bit.

Anyway, onto the responses to specific questions/statements.

Looking at this from my subjective perspective I would say that you guys have been doing a fantastic job here of being open, honest and revealing. You make regular livestreams, detailing where you are, what you are doing and how it looks, even though it is nowhere near polished. Several Uber employees are regular contributors to forum discussions (Yourself, Neutrino and bgolus, I've even seen UberGaf, Scathis, o and a few others on occasion). You share contentious/pivotal design ideas with the community (mainly the Backers Forum which is understandable) for thoughts and getting a gauge on what the community thinks.

All of this is unprecedented from what I have seen of game development, and in my mind very refreshing as well as a move in the right direction.

That's true, the kickstarter page does not show you saying you will support XP, it also doesn't say that you wouldn't support XP, 32-bit etc.

Now, I cannot know what you guys knew at the time, maybe you guys hadn't thought about it at that point, maybe you guys thought XP could handle the scope. The issue as I see it though is people were unaware of the technical challenges when it came to XP/32 bit and just assumed this would be fine when they kickstarted/pre-ordered. If they find out that XP is not supported now, then can feel betrayed and lash out (hence negative publicity).

To be clear, this isn't my opinion, I don't mind and to certain extent, I am happy to have a good enough reason to migrate to Linux from Windows. All I was trying to do is state what I can see as an obstacle to the removal of XP/32 bit support (and I'm sure you already know this - refer to my previous "how to suck eggs" quote ;-) )

All I can say to this is the internet is home to quite a few people with limited access to reality, it doesn't stop them from being unreasonable... ;-)

And in response to veta's comment:

I don't disagree with you here, and it is a noble gesture to consider kickstarter this way. However, the capitalist world in general works as a barter system, so people trend towards mindsets of "I've paid money for this, I expect such and such", i.e. entitlement.

I do somewhat hold to this opinion, i.e. I am hoping that the goods and services of my kickstarter pledge will be met (game, and other assorted perks due to my pledge level), but I am understanding of research and development projects (being that I work with one myself), where scope can and will change, so what is initially pitched in my subjective understanding may not be the finished product due to unforeseeable circumstances.

As a customer, unless the product is complete, you need to be flexible with your expectations, because of murphy's law and all.

It's relatively easy, raise/keep the minimum RAM requirements beyond 4GB (hopefully doing something sensible with the RAM and not just a few memory leaks for the fun of it ) and then you can ditch the 32Bit client altogether.

32 or 64Bit is seldom a question of software needs, most of the time it's just a question of "Oh I need more RAM, ok I will upgrade my os". If they don't need more hardware resources there isn't much motivation for upgrading to 64Bit. That's the main reason why so many systems still run on 32Bit.
Except for a few nerds, not many people upgrade from a 32 Bit system to a 64bit system just to run the same software on it as before. On the other side, if you give them a reason (good but demanding software) to increase their hardware, the os will just follow suit without much discussion.

I can honestly tell you the biggest reason that no one necessarily upgraded to 64 bit yet is that it really wasn't needed at all for most people. I am going to just throw out a number and say that 99.999999% of all programs are still 32bit even if they are running on 64 bit machines, and they themselves can not use that extra ram and for many people who buy computers infrequently it didn't matter if it was 64 or 32 bit, the computer ran the same.

Only very recently has certain large programs actually moved to 64 bit, among those being photoshop and other image manipulation programs, while most programs still either have no need or use for the 64 bit. Recently we have seen games not having a 64 bit counterpart really hurt people though, among those being SupCom, and Sins and that being said I am happy that PA will have a 64 bit client ( and I assume servers as well, need somewhere to store those maps).

All of this being said, I believe it would be wise to atleast put a warning on the steam page stating it doesn't support XP and a warning in servers so that when it detects certain conditions it prevents 32 bit clients from connecting as a crashed client without reason in a match is the most annoying thing in all of the world (not enough free memory to allocate). You could also set this up as an option for the people who know that they are going to go over the 32 bit limit within the games.

A 64 bit OS has been necessary for gaming for a while now even if all of your games are 32 bit. This is because many games will use 3-4 gigs of ram. Civilization 5 is a good example and its not even that new. If the OS can only address ~3.75 gig of RAM total and one program needs all of it then you have a problem since things like Steam, AV software, your browser, your music player, your IM/Voice chat client, and the OS itself all also need RAM. So your box starts paging and your Civ5 game slows to a crawl.

Now on a 64 bit OS with 8 gigs of RAM the OS just allocates the 32 bit Civ5 process a full four 4 gigs of memory and happily uses the other 4 gigs to run the rest of your box. Problem solved.

I am willing to bet that the 32 bit PA client will also have this problem on a 32 bit OS. And if going up to a 64 bit OS fixes the issue to some extent then you might as well just use the 64 bit PA client and fix the issue entirely.

Um, someone correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't your motherboard and processor both have to support a 64 bit addressing scheme? It isn't a simple matter of adding bigger/more memory sticks and installing a 64-bit OS, right?

Correct, but no one has made any hardware that doesn't support 64bit in over 5 years, at least not that could really play games. So if you have an even remotely recent PC it actually is just a matter of adding more RAM and a 64bit OS.

The only 32-bit processors you can (could?) buy, at least on Intel, were Atom processors up to a year or two ago. Not sure if they're still available or not, or if they've all transitioned to 64-bit. Regardless, while we expect some limited atom support in the future, we set the minimum requirements at dual core for good reason. It's unlikely a single core atom will be able to keep up.

I'm less familiar with the AMD processor line up, because at least for a few years, their naming fragmentation was so bad, I couldn't figure out up or down.

But Win98 support is in... right?... right?!

I don't think I can recall you stating in your kickstarter that PA wouldn't run on Windows 98, so I think I'm good.

I guess I could always upgrade to Window ME.

The last 32 bit only mainstream desktop CPUs AMD made were the mid grade Athlon XP's based on the Barton core introduced in December 2004. The last flagship 32 bit only chip they made was the Athlon XP 3200+, also based on the Barton core, introduced in October 2003.

I think a few of the very early socket 754 Palermo based Semprons might have been made as 32 bit only chips in early 2005 but it seems that they enabled 64 bit support in later stepping revisions so you would need to check the part number on the CPU to see if you got one of the "gimped" ones or not. But these were budget CPUs anyway and not intended for the gaming market. They were slow back then and would be laughably obsolete today.

However everything AMD has ever made in the mainstream desktop space since then has been 64 bit capable. AMD users have actually been living in a 64 bit only world for over 8 years. Which I think is quite a bit longer than the Intel crowd if you don't count the mobile market.

I can vouch that the majority of people running 32-bit OSes don't realise that their system is 64 bit capable.

I also don't think that most people running 32 bit Windows realize that every single 32 bit Vista/7/8 OEM install comes with a license for both the 32 and 64 bit version of the OEM installed OS. This allows them to switch from 32 to 64 bit without having to buy another Windows license as long as they stay with the same Windows version and edition.

Most of Intels CPUs have been 64bit since early 2004 so they were only really a few months behind AMD, though Intel did make a couple of low budget 32bit CPUs after that.

Yeah I think the only real difference is that AMD was a little bit quicker than Intel to ditch 32 bit only chips in the budget CPU market.

I used to run the 64-bit version of XP. Some drivers where a pain to find but it was rock solid due to all drivers having to have passed the Microsoft driver certification thing.

64-bit support in XP was honestly aimed at developers only. It never really had many practical applications for most consumers. Between driver support and application availability, it just was never much of a focus. Vista helped it, but win 7 really moved 64 bit in windows to a full fledged OS, rather than an afterthought.

Well, i am deffinitly not the lucky ones, i got 32-Bit and no way to update on 64-Bit, so i got to wait. I am quit happy that they still support 32-bit users, even if we ARE in the minority (maybe in the US, in germany 32-bit is still not a minority and we are still the second-largest gaming marked) but quit frankly i cant afford a new OS at this time

Dont see a reason to force people to get there systems up to 64-bit or change the OS only for one game. If ppl rlly think like that they should play a console, all the same hardware in every console. PC´s are about individual choices and so on. So it´s just a bit longer to wait. Will survive it, the weather get´s better. xD

Oh and, no, i cant get a 64-bit upgrade with my license, i checked that out 4 years ago. It doesnt work on every license.

Dual boot 32 bit Windows and 64 bit Linux?

Unfortunately my knowledge of Windows licensing is limited to the US. In other countries things may work differently.

Running a 64 bit OS is not about everyone having the same hardware like a console. Its about everyone being able to use modern hardware. Please see my earlier post about memory usage for 32 bit Civilization 5 on 32 and 64 bit systems.