Fantastic bits and where to find them
Hi everyone, I am Lorenzo aka Duplo aka The Battlepope aka The Caped Crusader and I am programmer on our beloved Europa Universalis 4. You may have seen me in the Dharma Dev Clash, struggling to spread Catholicism and occasionally getting betrayed by fellow Italians and wrecked up by Venice AI
In these last weeks we announced that 1.28.3 was the last Europa Universalis 4 release supporting 32-bit, since we are moving toward 64-bit. I thought it would be nice to give to all of you an insight of what this means, what to genuinely expect in the near future and what to definitely not expect.
There's been a lot of fuss about 64 vs 32-bit apps lately. But what is all of this about?
It is no mystery that Apple decided to deprecate 32-bit apps in MacOS 10.14 "Mojave" (2018) in order to drop the support completely in the future: they are doing an amazing job reminding us about this every time we launch Steam or our beloved Europa Universalis 4.
What may be less known is that while 32-bit apps may still run on the latest MacOS release the new development environment was stripped out of all the fancy 32-bit support, making it painful for the poor developers to even compile the game. They are trying hard to make everyone move to 64. But why?
If I got your attention so far, we can finally dive into the topic. It's going to be great.
The fellowship of the bits
When we say 64-bit, we are talking about x86-64, a CPU architecture designed by AMD of which the specifications were released in the year of our Lord 2000.
In the year 2001, the Linux kernel started supporting this new architecture, even if there were no processors available on the market yet.
In the year 2003, the very first x86-64 processor is released: the AMD64 Opteron. Several Linux distributions were already supporting x86-64.
In the year 2005, Microsoft discontinued the IA-64 (another 64-bit architecture from Intel) version of Windows XP, and released Windows XP Professional x64 Edition.
In the year 2009, Apple latest state of the of art system, Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard", was released with full support for 64 bits on the x86-64 platform. Also Windows 7 started to be loaded by default in his 64 bit version on most new computers.
In the year 2011, with Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion", Apple decided to drop the support for 32-bit CPUs, effectively starting that modernization process of their platform that last year resulted in the deprecation of 32-bit apps.
Nice. But still, why should I care?
Well, there are several reasons to actually move to 64-bit. The looming threat of deprecation on MacOS is maybe the most evident, but there is much more. The x86-64 architecture is better than its older brother, by far.
Without going too much into technical details, the advantages of going full 64-bit can be summarized in three main points:
Extended address space
64-bit applications can break the hard limit of 4 GB of RAM. By several orders of magnitude. Do you like blobbing in Europa Universalis 4? Think about how happy the CPUs would be if they could do the same with RAM.
Capacity increase
64-bit registers and 64-bit enabled operands that will allow the CPU to perform trivially operations that were costly in the 32-bit architecture. Didn’t you want to find your way from Paris to Beijing in the blink of an eye?
Larger number of general-purpose registers
In compute-intensive code, the 64-bit compiler will make use of these additional registers to better optimize the generated program. Russia will be able to recruit Streltsy even faster!
There is also another, non-technical, advantage: support. While Microsoft is not as zealous as Apple in its crusade against legacy technology, they are obviously putting most of their efforts in the new - and definitely more common - architecture. Of course the 32-bit tools are still doing an honest job, but having the chance to move to the new 64-bit ones will allow us to get advantage of the new hardware features, getting less bugs and better performances.
Wow! Great!
That said, moving to 64-bits won’t magically make the game run twice as fast, nor it will make more content appear out of nothing. While the migration to the new architecture itself will have little impact on Europa Universalis 4 at the beginning, it will put the foundation for the future development, allowing us - the programmers - to gradually try to squeeze the most out of the CPUs! But important questions first...
Multithreading when?
Really? C’mon… The lack of multithreading in Europa Universalis 4 has been a common misconception for a long time.
What is multithreading about? Multithreading involves taking small pieces of logic and potentially execute them at the same time, getting advantage of the multiple cores of modern CPUs. The advantage of multithreading is that we can squeeze the most of the processor and get things done faster, because executed at the same time. The main problem of multithreading is that it’s impossible to predict when the Operating System is going to let them run, as the execution of threads is completely out of the application control. Working with multithreading is basically finding the proper balance between the potentially better performances given by running tasks at the same time and the performance loss due to the synchronization.
This tradeoff is especially noticeable in Europa Universalis 4 as the game has tons of small pieces of information to calculate, and each of them is heavily influencing the AI behavior.
There are things that can be safely executed in parallel - and indeed they are executed that way - like loading and processing data, updating independent pieces of the gamestate, cache calculations, most of AI behaviors… But there are also things that definitely cannot: pieces of gamestate dependent on other pieces to be calculated before and so on... Trying to force those interdependent operations to be executed in parallel would produce non-deterministic results - different results even with exactly the same initial state - and inconsistent data. This non-deterministic behavior can lead to the game crashing, because the data dependent for an operation might be still in an incomplete state.
A mysterious and shady voice I can hear behind me explains this problem this way:
One of the focus of us, programmers, is to try to get the best performances possible, while adding new cool features. Multithreading is already a powerful tool in our toolbox. Multithreading is a thing in Europa Universalis 4, and it’s here to stay
This old, but still valid Development Diary is an example of our effort to get the best performances out of our game, and the charts show how multithreading is actually a fundamental part of this effort!
If you have any question, please write them in this thread. I'll follow the discussion and try to answer all of you!
Hi everyone, I am Lorenzo aka Duplo aka The Battlepope aka The Caped Crusader and I am programmer on our beloved Europa Universalis 4. You may have seen me in the Dharma Dev Clash, struggling to spread Catholicism and occasionally getting betrayed by fellow Italians and wrecked up by Venice AI
In these last weeks we announced that 1.28.3 was the last Europa Universalis 4 release supporting 32-bit, since we are moving toward 64-bit. I thought it would be nice to give to all of you an insight of what this means, what to genuinely expect in the near future and what to definitely not expect.
There's been a lot of fuss about 64 vs 32-bit apps lately. But what is all of this about?
It is no mystery that Apple decided to deprecate 32-bit apps in MacOS 10.14 "Mojave" (2018) in order to drop the support completely in the future: they are doing an amazing job reminding us about this every time we launch Steam or our beloved Europa Universalis 4.
What may be less known is that while 32-bit apps may still run on the latest MacOS release the new development environment was stripped out of all the fancy 32-bit support, making it painful for the poor developers to even compile the game. They are trying hard to make everyone move to 64. But why?
If I got your attention so far, we can finally dive into the topic. It's going to be great.
The fellowship of the bits
When we say 64-bit, we are talking about x86-64, a CPU architecture designed by AMD of which the specifications were released in the year of our Lord 2000.
In the year 2001, the Linux kernel started supporting this new architecture, even if there were no processors available on the market yet.
In the year 2003, the very first x86-64 processor is released: the AMD64 Opteron. Several Linux distributions were already supporting x86-64.
In the year 2005, Microsoft discontinued the IA-64 (another 64-bit architecture from Intel) version of Windows XP, and released Windows XP Professional x64 Edition.
In the year 2009, Apple latest state of the of art system, Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard", was released with full support for 64 bits on the x86-64 platform. Also Windows 7 started to be loaded by default in his 64 bit version on most new computers.
In the year 2011, with Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion", Apple decided to drop the support for 32-bit CPUs, effectively starting that modernization process of their platform that last year resulted in the deprecation of 32-bit apps.
Nice. But still, why should I care?
Well, there are several reasons to actually move to 64-bit. The looming threat of deprecation on MacOS is maybe the most evident, but there is much more. The x86-64 architecture is better than its older brother, by far.
Without going too much into technical details, the advantages of going full 64-bit can be summarized in three main points:
Extended address space
64-bit applications can break the hard limit of 4 GB of RAM. By several orders of magnitude. Do you like blobbing in Europa Universalis 4? Think about how happy the CPUs would be if they could do the same with RAM.
Capacity increase
64-bit registers and 64-bit enabled operands that will allow the CPU to perform trivially operations that were costly in the 32-bit architecture. Didn’t you want to find your way from Paris to Beijing in the blink of an eye?
Larger number of general-purpose registers
In compute-intensive code, the 64-bit compiler will make use of these additional registers to better optimize the generated program. Russia will be able to recruit Streltsy even faster!
There is also another, non-technical, advantage: support. While Microsoft is not as zealous as Apple in its crusade against legacy technology, they are obviously putting most of their efforts in the new - and definitely more common - architecture. Of course the 32-bit tools are still doing an honest job, but having the chance to move to the new 64-bit ones will allow us to get advantage of the new hardware features, getting less bugs and better performances.
Wow! Great!
That said, moving to 64-bits won’t magically make the game run twice as fast, nor it will make more content appear out of nothing. While the migration to the new architecture itself will have little impact on Europa Universalis 4 at the beginning, it will put the foundation for the future development, allowing us - the programmers - to gradually try to squeeze the most out of the CPUs! But important questions first...
Multithreading when?
Really? C’mon… The lack of multithreading in Europa Universalis 4 has been a common misconception for a long time.
What is multithreading about? Multithreading involves taking small pieces of logic and potentially execute them at the same time, getting advantage of the multiple cores of modern CPUs. The advantage of multithreading is that we can squeeze the most of the processor and get things done faster, because executed at the same time. The main problem of multithreading is that it’s impossible to predict when the Operating System is going to let them run, as the execution of threads is completely out of the application control. Working with multithreading is basically finding the proper balance between the potentially better performances given by running tasks at the same time and the performance loss due to the synchronization.
This tradeoff is especially noticeable in Europa Universalis 4 as the game has tons of small pieces of information to calculate, and each of them is heavily influencing the AI behavior.
There are things that can be safely executed in parallel - and indeed they are executed that way - like loading and processing data, updating independent pieces of the gamestate, cache calculations, most of AI behaviors… But there are also things that definitely cannot: pieces of gamestate dependent on other pieces to be calculated before and so on... Trying to force those interdependent operations to be executed in parallel would produce non-deterministic results - different results even with exactly the same initial state - and inconsistent data. This non-deterministic behavior can lead to the game crashing, because the data dependent for an operation might be still in an incomplete state.
A mysterious and shady voice I can hear behind me explains this problem this way:
One of the focus of us, programmers, is to try to get the best performances possible, while adding new cool features. Multithreading is already a powerful tool in our toolbox. Multithreading is a thing in Europa Universalis 4, and it’s here to stay
This old, but still valid Development Diary is an example of our effort to get the best performances out of our game, and the charts show how multithreading is actually a fundamental part of this effort!
If you have any question, please write them in this thread. I'll follow the discussion and try to answer all of you!
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