Friday Facts #41

[RawCode]

i see no reason to "discuss" obvious things.

intel dropped 32 bit desktop processors in 2006
amd in 2008

any desktop running 32bit processor is atleast 6 years old or using non desktop hardware.

there is no reason to support 32bit architecture right now, ever if 32bit support dropped, only few people will get butthurt

[Rahjital]

there is no reason to support 32bit architecture right now, ever if 32bit support dropped, only few people will get butthurt

So you would prevent almost 20% people from playing the game? That's a terrible idea for a small indie studio like the Factorio dev team, they can't simply throw a fifth of their potential profits out the window. 20% is not "only few people".

[MtNak]

"special note"
there is no 32bit processors in production for years, 8-16gb memory is common.

Anecdotal evidence I know, but from personal experience most people aren't ready to upgrade simply due to the cost. The enthusiast crowd has almost all moved over to 64bit at this point in the cycle (or at least those that can afford to upgrade) while the everyday gamer will often hold out until their current favourite game is not playable at their standards. Some people will hold out until they can upgrade via the cheapest path at the end of a product life cycle. Now this changes from game to game but you will see reports where a games playerbase leans heavily in favour of 64 bit but you will also sometimes see the opposite.

I would guess that overall this balances out at around the 50/50 mark still with many of those having a max of 4gig ram and most a lot less.

Here in Argentina, a PC that 2 years ago in USA costed 300-400 usd, here is about 1 entire month of salary.

I have a 5 year old high end pc, and by our standards, i have a really really good pc. Not a lot of people here have half of this

[Nova]

"64 bit cpu" != "64 bit operating system"

There are "many" systems which run 32 bit OS on a 64 bit processor. Enough to still support 32 bit.

[Marconos]

I have a 32 bit CPU and 32 bit operating system that I purchased last year. It's a tablet that runs windows 8.1 but I could probably play factorio on it. It's not a tablet friendly game and I'm not asking it to be one

[Agomy]

As i could only find a mod which is actually kinda buggy - are there any plans on terrain forming? or at least some kind of Bridges? I would prefer terrain forming or bridges but are there Boats or Planes in the making? Because if you create a terrain with water its very likely that you will end up to be separated by water of some part of the world.

[RawCode]

I have a 32 bit CPU and 32 bit operating system that I purchased last year. It's a tablet that runs windows 8.1 but I could probably play factorio on it. It's not a tablet friendly game and I'm not asking it to be one

i clearly stated "desktop hardware" not server,embedded, laptop or smarphone or anything else.

as for cost and other stuff, two years ago i got "top" i7 on 2011 socket that will stay top for 2 more years before new DDRSDRAM pass specifications and new processors for this type of memory is released

[campos.ddc]

We mostly use python scripting to automate build steps, and compile C++ via MSVC and SCons. Git for source control, every feature branch has its own build that can be tested before merging into master (master should always be stable and ready to create a release). Some of this code is open source developed by me, and I'd be happy to share with you.

I've been working with DevOps for the past 4 years, in a multi platform environment (though no OSX) and using Jenkins.
I am responsible for the whole build/delivery process for the company (35+ developers), which means that I'm the one configuring Jenkins and deciding how a build works.

I believe you can find my email from the forum user, so feel free to ask me anything there. (I also have suggestions for task management/bug report/sprint and version tracking if you are interested).

[Drizzt321]

i see no reason to "discuss" obvious things.

intel dropped 32 bit desktop processors in 2006
amd in 2008

any desktop running 32bit processor is atleast 6 years old or using non desktop hardware.

there is no reason to support 32bit architecture right now, ever if 32bit support dropped, only few people will get butthurt

They didn't drop support for 32-bit, they just simply both had adopted the same 64-bit extensions of the 32-bit extensions of the 16-bit 8086 ISA. Also you're wrong, in that AMD originated the x86_64 (why do you think all the linux builds call it amd64 generally?) which was first released with the Opteron in 2003. Intel adopted the x86_64 from AMD, and released starting in 2004 with a Xeon.

Now, despite processor support, it wasn't really until Win7 64-bit that I feel it gained widespread adoption as WinXP 64-bit apparently was only OK, and Vista was, well...it was Vista. Even though there were 64-bit SKUs of it. At least on the Windows/gamer side. Under *nix, it very quickly was the norm for the distros to have 64-bit compilations of their repositories, and it was generally rather easy since the core libraries & kernels pretty much always had run on server hardware which had been moving to 64-bit for the various CPU ISAs for quite some time.

[RawCode]

snip

show me desktop 32bit only processor released after 2008 year and we will discuss more.

special note: you wont find such processor

special note 2: xeon is SERVER processor, not desktop one.

[Gammro]

I'm of the opinion IA-32 should have been completely phased out for x86-64 by the time of the release of Windows 8, but the Atom Z6xx series was released in 2010 and doesn't support 64-bit.
AFAIK, Atom is not so much the literal definition of a "desktop" but definitely mainstream consumer material.

[Drizzt321]

snip

show me desktop 32bit only processor released after 2008 year and we will discuss more.

special note: you wont find such processor

special note 2: xeon is SERVER processor, not desktop one.

As Gammro pointed out, the Atom Z6 series. Leaving that aside, as I'm sure you'll argue (mostly correctly IMO) that it's not a desktop CPU. Moving on, I was correcting your timeline. You stated AMD dropped support in 2008. Completely wrong. Besides getting the wrong date, neither Intel nor AMD have dropped support for 32-bit. It's that they've added support for the x86_64 extensions for 64-bit support. Just like with Microsoft, backwards compatibility is key to the longevity and massively widespread use of the basic x86 platform. That and it's relative openness for expansion.

No, your argument that Factorio should ignore 32-bit compiled code is fine to debate. However you need to realize that just because a hardware architecture might be capable of running 64-bit code, that doesn't mean the OS that's running on it is. One of the key bits of the x86_64 extensions are to run in 32-bit only mode, hybrid 32/64-bit, or pure 64-bit. With Windows XP (leaving aside the 64-bit version which was fairly rare), it's running in the 32-bit only mode. Still quite a few out there, but I suspect most consumers who would run Factorio probably won't be running on it. Thus, Windows Vista, 7, or 8/8.1. Vista does have a 64-bit version, but I think most people had a 32-bit version. So now we come to Win7, and then Win 8/8.1. I'd say most are running a 64-bit version as most gamers know to get >4GB of memory, so at 6GB or 8GB on a machine, the OEMs will install Windows 64-bit. Still, on many lower end machines they are still running at most 4GB, and the OEMs may be giving them 32-bit Windows, and some of those will be kids who don't have a choice and may very well be wanting to play Factorio.

Now, is it worth the time and effort? I dunno. Depends on how difficult it is for them to build it for both x86 & x86_64 at the same time.

[RawCode]

in "extremely rare cases" developers must ensure their application to meet 2\4gb memory limit of 32 bit platform, this "optimization" cost both time and resources.

in case of 64bit only developers will have much larger memory windows and can deticate time to something else.

[TheWombatGuru]

I can't wait for #42

[Drizzt321]

Well, according to the Steam Hardware Survey, it's about 80% 64-bit versions of windows. Now that does follow the 80/20 rule, however 20% of potential market share is not a small thing. Although I agree, in the fairly near future it would make sense for nearly all developers (or at least, game & applications that use lots of memory) to target only 64-bit Win API.