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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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Focus on one computer architect.
Old dependencies avoided or updated dependencies.
Faster development
Less bugs.
More memory allocation (so smooth game)

Conclusion:
Less painful to developers.
Happier developers.
Funnier developers.
If EU4 developers are any good, this change should come down to changing one build setting in Visual Studio
 
So switching to 64 bit basically means the devs no longer have to ensure the game uses no more than 2-4gb of RAM at all times, which I guess would be why earlier in the year they increased EU4's minimum and recommended specs on Steam from the 2-4 gb RAM it was before.
 
Can we hope fore better AI warfare in upcoming patch? Cause in 1.28.3 it still ignore player armies, and go as far as he can to carpetsiege some meaningless provinces. By the time AI reach it goal his homeland is fully occupied.
 
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.

While it's true that pointers are larger (main perf disadvantage of x86_64), it will still bring some performance advantage mainly because of two things - more registers (additional 64bit regs are automatically used by compiler) & faster syscalls (there's special instruction for them) so the switch is usually net performance gain of about 4-11% depending on application.

Also, I think that they are some limitations when using 32bit mode such as limited access to AVX but I am not really sure about this. If they are, at the same time, switching to newer compiler (likely), then we could be seeing even better improvements with new optimizations and perhaps better vectorization of code.
 
I'm looking forward to these changes & the new DLC.
 
So is the next major change going to be Pax Europa or whatever it's called, or will there be changes between now and then to redress the technical debt?

It was said a while ago that Tech Debt first, and we're unlikly to see a new expansion or anything for a few months at least.
 
What more will the devs be able to do if they aren't held back by 32-bit?
So what are the advantages of having 64-bit instead of 32?
Considering Mac OS is removing 32-bit support (most likely in the next number update) this makes a lot of sense.
Apple's decision to drop 32 bits was indeed one the motivations here. Steam also disables a lot of features on 32 bits OS.
So far Microsoft and Canonical (Ubuntu) haven't been as aggressive but that time may also come.

Also, I think that they are some limitations when using 32bit mode such as limited access to AVX but I am not really sure about this. If they are, at the same time, switching to newer compiler (likely), then we could be seeing even better improvements with new optimizations and perhaps better vectorization of code.
64 bits would indeed offer the option of enabling AVX but that would mean upgrading the minimum CPU requirements, which is premature at this stage.

In any case we'll keep as always a close look at performance and make sure the switch won't impact you guys in a bad way.
 
Very interesting. What all of this year’s DDs tell me is that EU4 is here to stay for a long arse time, and EU5 ain’t coming any time soon. I am very crurious about the state of the game, not just gameplaywise, and its popularity at the end of this year.
 
Very interesting. What all of this year’s DDs tell me is that EU4 is here to stay for a long arse time, and EU5 ain’t coming any time soon. I am very crurious about the state of the game, not just gameplaywise, and its popularity at the end of this year.

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.
 
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.
I just want Eu IV to be as polished as possible when the development ends. That's why I'm glad that they decided to take their time with new expansion. I wouldn't mind if they did this after every dlc.
 
And I was here thinking you would be fixing current Golden Century problems...

For instance I am still waiting for that PU Cassus Belli against Castille on the Portuguese Mission Tree or for correct Portuguese Ideas.

64 or 32 support for me is irrelevant.