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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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Well, I'm glad I'm not one of the 1.1% that has a 32-bit system.
Really only that small a number has 32-bit? Still works out to thousands of unhappy players though, I guess.

What more will the devs be able to do if they aren't held back by 32-bit?
 
Have you considered anything else on my proposals for improving the GC content? You said you would look into them and I just wanted to get an update on team thoughts.
Thanks, appreciate your time :)
 
So what are the advantages of having 64-bit instead of 32?
Mostly on preformance. Like less chance on lag at late game due able to access more than 4GB ram. Better graphic, but don't think it's the focus.

Also I think some bugs related to large numbers might be harder to trigger. Like the CTD when taking too much loans.
 
I'm suprised that 1.1% of users still use 32 bit computer.
It used to be common especially for a bit during Win XP heyday to have 32 bit OS on a system supporting 64 bit otherwise. It also happens that people install the wrong version of the OS, especially those on low-memory systems where it might not seem to immediatly matter (but to be honest i have no idea how common this is). Kinda curious if it's possible to see how many of those 1.1% are 32 bit OS users on 64 bit CPU. ;)

I think the switch to 64 bit is more to futureproof the game than necessarily improving performance though (unless there are planned changes that would balloon memory usage :D ). 64 bit porting can be anywhere from changing a simple few lines to being a huge overhaul depending on how the program is coded, a common saying is that MS opted to not include the Space Cadet Pinball game in vista cause they required all built in applications to be 64 bit, and the game physics broke apart when they tried to port it to 64 bit.
 
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We'll make further reminders regarding 32-bit support closer to the next update, but this will be months away.

Does this mean there won't be another bug-crushing update before the next major update? If that will be months away, maybe there is space to collect suggestions from people about additional bugs to fix before then.
 
Also I think some bugs related to large numbers might be harder to trigger. Like the CTD when taking too much loans.
Uhm, just compiling as a 64bit binary doesn't magically change the internal size of variables and stuff. also, you can have 64bit integers in 32bit programs.
 
Uhm, just compiling as a 64bit binary doesn't magically change the internal size of variables and stuff. also, you can have 64bit integers in 32bit programs.
It can change it in some cases in C/C++ but setting a fixed width on integers is a incredible common (and good) practice in programming to prevent unpredictable results from porting to various platforms. So yeah it probably won't magically change the size of most variables, if the code follows good practice. :)
 
Should use up less memory when running the game, meaning the game will run smoother.
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.
 
Finally having 16gb of RAM is good for something!
 
With 64-bit compatibility, will this mean the game can support much more provinces on the map and things going on at the same time without adding lag?