Initial Alpha access restricted to 64 bit OS

But because they can use a 64bit OS it means that a 32bit OS is not needed and thus it is not a reason for 32bit OSs to still be around.

I agree with you friend, there in No technical reasons, be it from the hardware makers or the programmers side, for the 32bit still be alive. The reason is one of marketing, if I as a seller can sell both OSs, 32 and 64bit, at $50 but find a way to sell only the 32 bit version at $50 and overprice the 64 version to $70 and the people sill buy it, why would I kill the 32 version?

And this is why I had really hoped Win 8 had been 64 bit only; because someone will find a "reason" to sell it / buy it / use it when they really shouldn't.

Yes, a system with only 2gb of RAM does not need a 64 bit OS. However a system even with 4 GB of RAM is wasted on a 32 bit OS as it can only use ~3 gigs, and then only really if you modify the boot settings! The price of the 32 bit and 64 bit versions of Windows are also the same, so it's kind of a scam to charge more for it.


I do accept the fact there are plenty of people out there who are running legacy software that simply will not work or install (even if it would work) on a 64 bit OS. I'd also contend those aren't are target audience, or if they are they're hopefully smart enough to work around the issues. I'm sorry your 15+ year old game designed for hardware and software that no longer exists can't be perfectly played on completely different hardware and software than it was intended to function with. You don't toss a Dreamcast game in to an Xbox 360 and hope it works, and those two are more similar than a PC from 1999 and a PC of today.

edit: For those who don't know, the Dreamcast runs Windows, has a RISC cpu, and a tile based GPU... just like the Xbox 360.

I would love it if Uber simply did away with a 32 bit client altogether. 64 bit only. If anyone is still running 32, this will finally push them to 64 bit where they should be anyway. Heck, make the minimum ram requirement 8gb while you're at it. (Considering you can get 8 gb for 50 bux...)

The decision to release a 32 bit PA client is purely an economical one. If the number of projected 32 bit sales is enough to justify the cost of maintaining a fork from the main PA code base then it makes sense to release a 32 bit client. Simple as that.

Now the dedicated server app can (and should IMO) be 64 bit only. Since PA uses a client server model there is no reason that a 32 bit client couldn't benefit from a 64 bit server keeping track of everything. However I would prefer that servers be able to allow/disallow 32 bit PA clients from connecting.

Except that as far as I'm aware playing by yourself still requires you to have a local server running on your machine so there would also need to be a 32bit server for people playing single player on a 32bit OS .

I am assuming that you will be able to setup a true dedicated server that doesn't launch the PA client and put you in the game. IE: on a box with no screen. If so, this can/should be 64 bit only.

The "local" server that is used for single player and LAN parties can be both 32 and 64 bit.

IMO there is one important thing here in the works as why there will be only 64bit alpha and that being that during alpha/beta you don't want to make your code unreadable by putting in early memory/speed optimizations. Not to mention that there will be a shootload of debug/trace symbols in there as well.

As a business programmer I once worked on a system which was designed to analyze stock market data for suspicous price changes. Single instance of the alpha prototype (several instances have been running in parallel on different machines) ate even 10GB+ ruling out 32bit OS.

Then when we were sure everything is working we dropped the memory consumption by a series of memory optimizations to like 1.25GB RAM so 32bit version was possible (not to mention tripple processing speed). And why we didn't do that in the first? Because the code became freakingly unreadable .

Bottom line: as the development goes closer to the release the HW requirenments will very likely drop. Possibly to even make a 32bit version possible (although I won't personally care).

Haha yeah, alpha builds are notoriously inefficient, though god only knows how an application like that got up to 10gb, I freak out over allocating as little as 1mb, but I used to work on PS2 games where even being able to allocate just 10kb was a luxury at times, so I'm probably a little more paranoid than most .

That sounds familiar...

Big data sets are big; death by a bazillion little cuts... or a bazillion data copies and uncounted pointers.

Well, I guess it's a good thing I finally got a 64-bit OS and doubled my RAM up to 8 gigs, then.

Thank you, Christmas.

Just so you guys know this stuff is a tough call but is basically being made from a practicality standpoint. At this point the game simply allocates enough memory that a 32-bit OS is going to choke. We have to get the memory usage down to make 32-bit more viable for players and that's not happening during early alpha.

I'm very heavily leaning in the direction of removing XP support altogether. I would love to kill 32-bit personally but I'm not sure we can. Feel free to post your thoughts about this.

Kill it.

Is the final game product going to be compromised due to "dumbing down" everything that's going on for the sake of RAM storage on 32bit levels?

Kill it Neutrino.

I agree with nanolathe, unsurprisingly. Kill it.

To reiterate my earlier post:

However, if the number of people with a 32 bit OS is low enough, kill it. Kill it with fire.

I'm not sure if Valve releases the info on 32 vs 64 bit Windows from Steam but if they are willing to let you see it under some kind of NDA then this is probably the best way to gauge the 32 vs 64 distribution of the PC gamer market. The same process could be used to help make a decision on XP support. If they are willing to narrow it down to the people that bought games like Ruse, C&C 3, SupCom, or FA on Steam then that's even better.

The part about 32 bit support that worries me a bit is if you have a 64 bit server with three 64 bit clients and one 32 bit client. Will the client/server interaction be able to handle things if one client can't remember and display as many things as the others? Or does the whole game have to be "dumbed down" to let the 32 bit guy play?

Letting the server choose between allowing all PA clients or only allowing 64 bit PA clients would solve this I think.

I don't know if it's a wise move to kill it without some kind of refund policy.

I don't recall any limitations mentioned on the kickstarter or the Uberent store page so removing support for something (while not specifically stated to begin with) could generate some heat.

Even so.

Kill it.

There is only so much "pushing the boundaries" you guy's can do without dropping support for something at the rear end of the technological evolution.

Having said that, if you guy's drop support for standard architecture CPUs and go with the new fandangle Quantum processors I've been seeing in the news I'm going to be miffed!

Kill 32

You guys know your stuff, I'm fairly sure you'll be able to get 4 players, perhaps even 8 players working OK on moderate size maps for 32bit users, and I doubt anyone could fault you for not being able to offer more than that to them, especially when the alternative is not being able to play. PA will no doubt be fun to play with 2-4 players and if other RTS games are anything to go by 2-4 players will probably be the norm anyway so 32bit users probably wont be missing out on too much.

I think a return to the TA style of just being upfront about there being restrictions based on your hardware (or in this case OS) would work well if you do decide to support XP and/or 32bit. As I recall in TA there were maps that required 32mb or even 64mb of RAM to play and on my 16mb laptop it just indicated that I couldn't play it, but I was still having tonnes of fun with it and never once cursed the game or the developers for not being able to play everything, but when I finally got a new laptop I praised the developers for having even more content for me to explore with my brand new laptop and it's 128mb of RAM . I think it's a good way to encourage people to upgrade without making them feel left out, let them play but also let them see that there is even more available if they decide they want to upgrade.

Obviously though you should only bother with XP or 32bit if you think there's a large enough market for them to justify the extra work required, but that's something only you guys are in a position to know and I'm sure you've already looked over the Steam hardware survey results to estimate that . Of course I'm running Vista x64 so I would be quite happy if you just killed XP and 32bit, though I had toyed with using my media server (with a Intel Q9550 quad core) as a PA server and it's running a 32bit XP install, but I suspect my i7 2600k @ 4ghz would probably be better running both server and client simultaneously anyway .

Wow I never knew that Valve posted that info. Sweet. Looks like 64 bit OSs account for something like 75% of the surveyed steam installs. I'd say that's probably a large enough sample to be statistically representative of the PC gamer market as a whole.

With 25% of people (well Steam users) still on 32 bit, and many of them on XP, I don't see how you can ditch either unfortunately.