Now is a great time for a sale with the new patch and all.

[HerpInYourDerp]

Frankly, by far the most important updates this game really needs before anything else are 64-bit & multithreading support. A lot of people don't realise that the game barely touches the graphics card as it is right now and that's almost completely due to the very basic graphics it currently uses; the low-fi graphics may grate a few and seems to be constantly brought up in the wishlist topic, but it's sufficient for the job right now and is more a fluff upgrade than anything else.

What is actually serious and where the game gets really bad is the severe slowdown and lag/poor responsiveness when you have a lot of ships & colonies active in a game, especially if you want to zoom in to system-range or closer and this is precisely down to the game utilising only 1 thread. Even if just simple things like drawing the menus when you bring up charas/diplomacy/colonies etc. were offloaded to a second thread, it would still noticeably improve gameplay performance.
I'm well aware that it would require a major overhaul of code, but that along with 64-bit support to access more RAM are the two things which would universally improve the game more than anything else.

[Siddham]

The already game does support 64-bit...

[HerpInYourDerp]

The exe runs in 32bit mode.

[Siddham]

This from Elliot recently:

DW runs better on 64-bit Windows, because there's more memory available to it.

And you can load your old savegames fine on your new machine.

Thanks
Elliot

Also, from the Steam Store page:

Recommended:
OS: Windows Vista, Windows 7 or 8 (64-bit)

[HerpInYourDerp]

Which doesn't say DistantWorlds.exe can access more than the 4GB limit for 32bit process.

[Siddham]

Elliot says it very clearly....read it again..

"DW runs better on 64-bit Windows, because there's more memory available to it"

[Cauldyth]

32-bit applications can be compiled to use up to 4 GB when running on 64-bit Windows. On 32-bit they're limited to 2 GB. That's the source of Elliot's comment.

[SirHoraceHarkness]

ORIGINAL: Siddham


There is another space 4X recently released that has more shiny graphics...
but I prefer the look of DW
There are no doubt some graphical improvements which could be made inexpensively
for instance the ship and object models are relatively low res
so they could be improved easily
the present look of the game (which I like very much) could be sharpened-up
I dont think that would cost all that much in development time or expense

My point exactly. When I say graphics upgrade I mean refreshing the pixel art to be more in line with what's expected nowadays when you play a game using pixel art.

Gratuitous space battles does this pretty well and tosses in particles and lighting to boot and the results look very very good for a 2d game.

youtube /watch?v=fEh3N__hJ5E

youtube /watch?v=44vWgyoMF64

ORIGINAL: HerpInYourDerp

Frankly, by far the most important updates this game really needs before anything else are 64-bit & multithreading support. A lot of people don't realise that the game barely touches the graphics card as it is right now and that's almost completely due to the very basic graphics it currently uses; the low-fi graphics may grate a few and seems to be constantly brought up in the wishlist topic, but it's sufficient for the job right now and is more a fluff upgrade than anything else.

What is actually serious and where the game gets really bad is the severe slowdown and lag/poor responsiveness when you have a lot of ships & colonies active in a game, especially if you want to zoom in to system-range or closer and this is precisely down to the game utilising only 1 thread. Even if just simple things like drawing the menus when you bring up charas/diplomacy/colonies etc. were offloaded to a second thread, it would still noticeably improve gameplay performance.
I'm well aware that it would require a major overhaul of code, but that along with 64-bit support to access more RAM are the two things which would universally improve the game more than anything else.

Have you tried unchecking the most common messages for the scroll window at the top? Would get massive lag when the ai decided to do a massive refit of bases and ships but most of it went away after unchecking that specific message. Still get slowdown late game but nothing game inhibiting.

[Siddham]

On my 32-bit system the addressable ram limit is just slightly above3GBs

I would like to hear a developers comment on this issue

[Cauldyth]

The addressable RAM limit is, but any individual process can only use 2 GB.

[Siddham]

This is a discussion which could be quickly settled by a developer.

HerpInYourDerp wants "64-bit support to access more RAM"

The developers seem to have clearly state that DW supports 64bit and accesses more ram on 64bit

I have already quoted Elliot twice...

Now this from another thread by Erik:

"A 64-bit OS with 4GB+ of RAM should not normally have issues"

Perhaps one of the developers could settle this matter
which I will put in HerpInYourDerp's original words

Does Distant Worlds Universe have "64-bit support to access more RAM"

…or not?

Thanks

[Cauldyth]

* DW on 32-bit can use up to 2 GB, the limit for 32-bit.
* DW on 64-bit can use up to 4 GB. This is because it's still a 32-bit app, it's just been recompiled with a flag that allows 32-bit apps to use up to 4 GB of RAM on 64-bit Windows. 4 GB is the limit using that approach though, so to make use of more than 4 GB would require a large overhaul of the code.

That's consistent with:

* Elliot's comment that DW on 64-bit can access more RAM than on 32-bit, and his recommendation of 4 GB.
* HerpInYourDerp's desire to have DW rewritten as a native 64-bit application so that it can access even more than 4 GB.

[Erik Rutins]

Correct - 4GB is the current upper limit for DW and that can't reasonably be changed with the current engine. With a 64-bit OS and more than 4GB of memory, you're giving DW the maximum it can currently use. The current engine is multi-threaded as well, but there are limits to what we can do in that regard, so generally 4 CPU cores is also the most it would use.

Regards,

- Erik

[Siddham]

Thank you Erik for confirming and explaining that
and thank you Cauldyth for explaining it too

[Erik Rutins]

Hi folks,

Regarding the anniversary, keep an eye on the site later this week... [;)]

Regards,

- Erik

[major.pain]

I was beginning to think Erik was trolling me about a sale last week, now i am not so sure......

[Siddham]

highly unlikely...
but it might not be sale he is hinting at
?

[ashandresash]

My playtime is now full with other games, that's why I haven't got DW yet, but if a sale is coming... I'm sold [;)]



P.S. And... I got it

[IainMcNeil]

How about now!

http://www.matrixgames.com/products/515 ... -.Universe

[Erik Rutins]

Enjoy, folks.