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EU4 - Development Diary - 5th of February 2019

Good morning and welcome to today's EU4 Dev Diary. As many no-doubt noticed, yesterday, patch 1.28.3 went live. This contains hundreds of bug fixes which the team have been hammering away at over the course of January. It, along with other Technical Debt is one of the main focuses of the year and while they're not always so sexy to talk about and show off, they remain important. There will be more fixing to come as we work towards our big end of year expansion.

For those who missed it, you can check the full patch notes in last week's dev diary

This also marks the end of our free trial of Mandate of Heaven. It was exciting to try out such a system, where players could sample a DLC without having to commit to a purchase. In this case, not even needing to purchase a gaming magazine to get your demo disc. Given the very large uptake of the Mandate of Heaven trial, it's no question that we'll continue to do these on a monthly basis. Keep your eyes peeled towards the end of this month for the next Free DLC.

Something else that this patch marks the end of is something that has been requested quite a bit. 1.28.3 is be the last 32-bit version of EUIV, as we are going to upgrade EUIV to 64-bit in the next update. This comes with various advantages, but it also means that EUIV will no longer be supported by 32-bit systems for all platforms: Windows, Mac and Linux. 1.28.3 will be the last playable version of EUIV for 32-bit systems.

With a growing lack of support industry-wide for 32-bit, we have made this rather heavy decision. When we roll out the next update for EUIV, 32-bit users will either have to roll back to 1.28.3, or upgrade their system. We are letting you know this as soon as we can, so that users have the opportunity to upgrade in the coming months. This change will affect the 1.1% of our players who are currently playing EUIV on a 32-bit system.

We'll make further reminders regarding 32-bit support closer to the next update, but this will be months away.

As development continues with a heavy focus on technical debt among other things, it means we won't have any changes in the game to show off for some time, so expect some more light and/or filler dev diaries for a while.
 
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That's was the reason I stopped buying DLC's. As I did fear this moment in September/October, but no longer.

@DDRJake are Stellaris and Crusader Kings also moving to 64-bit?
Given that CKII is at the end of its development cycle, as i understand it, i highly doubt it.

For Stellaris, i guess it’s best to ask the Stellaris team.

On a side note, anything improving performance is music to my ears ! :)
 
The more they do for EU4, the more they will learn about what went right and what went wrong. This would lead to a much better EU5 upon release.
Lesson #1: Don't use ASCII encoding for a game where you'll be using names from languages all over the world.
 
This is great mews for us Mac players, especially, as others have alluded to. That said, I’m very very curious if there is a plan to upgrade the rest of the library to 64 in the near future, as well. Myself, I’m not going to be upgrading to the next version of MacOS, simply because I want to play my games (without booting up Windows on my machine), unless they’re all upgraded, of course. If only one or two titles remain 32 bit, I can roll with that, but I’ll be thrilled if they all upgrade in the near future.
 
Cool! I heard 64 bit magically solves all performance and ai problems and also significantly improves your chances to get an heir!
 
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Um.. no? Like, exactly the opposite - pointers will be using 64 bits instead of 32. If programmers are not planning to use specific 64-bit registers (for which they have no reason to in a game) there's no reason for this switch to affect performance whatsoever. The only difference may come from utilizing more than 4GB of RAM.
Correct. In 64 bit mode, all memory addresses are 64 bit instead of 32 bit. So data structures holding pointers (and of those there are a lot in a game like EU4) all grow in size. For the pointers alone you need those 64 bit registers ;)

CPU caches are fixed in size. So if everything (instruction, data pointers and such) grow larger, then the number of instructions that fit in the cache will go down. which, inevitably, means more cache misses. Which increases latency, and makes things slower.
 
Your weekly reminder to address culture conversion in syncretised/harmonised faiths, new world primitive status, and the entire problem with trade companies/capital movement. More info in signature. It's Chinese New Year right now, maybe a second attempt at new years resolve?
 
Your weekly reminder to address culture conversion in syncretised/harmonised faiths, new world primitive status, and the entire problem with trade companies/capital movement. More info in signature. It's Chinese New Year right now, maybe a second attempt at new years resolve?
Since we are talking about culture conversion I would like to mention culture mapmode for starting screen. It would be nice to have it.
 
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Not sure why people keep repeating this claim for EU5, why EU4 could not live for next 10-20 years? Software went from product to service, so games are nowadays migrating towards this direction. Either with free-to-play for skins and similar (League of Legends) to series of DLC's/extensions like EU4 or dying species of monthly subscriptions. And then technically you have Total War: Warhammer 1 & 2 as different instalments but when you buy 2nd you got all the factions from 1st and there are DLS's on top of that. So why people keep talking about EU5? It's great mystery of the universe to me. I would assume it's holly grail for unhappy customers that see EU5 as finally 'EU4 done right'.
 
Great to hear that we're moving to 64 bit! Slight shame for the 1% to be stuck with the tech debt, but ah well. Interested in hearing what other changes are planned for the game as a whole, especially the tech of it!

By the way, can we talk about the restriction on capital movement?
 
Correct. In 64 bit mode, all memory addresses are 64 bit instead of 32 bit. So data structures holding pointers (and of those there are a lot in a game like EU4) all grow in size. For the pointers alone you need those 64 bit registers ;)

True, but the impact on performance is bounded by amount of pointers in data structures the game is using. Just because your pointer to that gigabyte sized array of vectors went from 32 to 64bits is minuscule impact. But if that was some gigabyte sized linked list to some object that also has pointers, then impact is higher obviously.

Performance increases can also happen with simple recompile from x86 to x64. Not only compilers got much better and are actively developed for, but x64 has eight additional general purpose registers for code to use. Given that before some of those were semi-reserved, the increase is actually more than doubling. Calling convention also got much better, combined this means less variable spilling on stack, less memory read/writes and generally more performant code.
 
Happy New Year, everyone!

I'm very pleased with the patch - bugfixes and tech debt are a really important priority for a game like EUIV. And the demo was all too effective :oops:: I'm 99% certain that I'll buy Mandate of Heaven during Lunar New Year.

I'm quite disappointed with the decision to abandon 32-bit support though. It doesn't affect me, but there will be thousands of players who will miss out on future bugfixes. It appears that Apple has pretty much forced PDX to choose between supporting 32-bit and supporting MacOS, so my annoyance is directed at Cupertino, not Stockholm. It's really unfortunate that the fruity firm's policy of forcing users to regularly buy new and more expensive hardware is going to be inflicted upon people who aren't even Apple customers.
 
Not sure why people keep repeating this claim for EU5, why EU4 could not live for next 10-20 years? Software went from product to service, so games are nowadays migrating towards this direction. Either with free-to-play for skins and similar (League of Legends) to series of DLC's/extensions like EU4 or dying species of monthly subscriptions. And then technically you have Total War: Warhammer 1 & 2 as different instalments but when you buy 2nd you got all the factions from 1st and there are DLS's on top of that. So why people keep talking about EU5? It's great mystery of the universe to me. I would assume it's holly grail for unhappy customers that see EU5 as finally 'EU4 done right'.

Well I can understand calls for EU5 and CK3 with an Imperator-style map.