The 2nd Elemental Expansion needs to be a 64-bit application if it is feasible.

WoM was supposed to have a 64 bit version at one point. With how that disappeared off the radar, I'm not sure I expect it to come back anytime soon.

I think it's a smart idea. Like he said, the majority of people that are getting FE will be getting it for free. Think of the games we could play if it were 64bit (think properly huge maps).

Sounds like Derek Paxton is well aware of the problem.

DIG: How have you approached the range of PC processing power on the market?

D. P.: The most significant limitation for turn-based strategy games on the PC is the amount of memory a 32-bit operating system allows to an application. Our players want to play on large worlds, worlds that dwarf even the largest StarCraft II maps.

On most saves I check from players, there are well over 1,000 units on the map, as well as numerous cities, buildings and forests. One of the major focuses for Fallen Enchantress is to make the world as interesting as possible. Visual variety is a big part of that, all of which has to be stored in memory so the player can quickly scroll around the map. The problem isn’t storing just what the player is seeing on the screen, but everything the player could be seeing. It’s a significant limitation that we are constantly fighting with.

  http://www.business2community.com/tech-gadgets/fallen-enchantress-is-set-to-rise-part-2-046071

Doesn't sound like it will be implemented for E:FE anyway. Hopefully for the second expansion.

Sure it's a smart idea. But it also can't be a priority until the game is fun. A not-fun game with 64 bits still isn't fun. It was on the feature list at one point and got cut like a lot of other stuff, so I don't know if it'll ever come back.

If FE ends up unfun- I'd be ok with no 2nd Elemental and spending the money on a GalCiv III.

That said, I have faith that FE will be at least a solid game. 

a fun FE- will, since you're giving away a free XP- I think you can afford yo be experimental since people will have a good GE game to fall back on.

I don't get why graphics has to pwn gampelay.  Last month I started playing Age of Wonders and was surprised at the size of some of those maps.  With many of them having three levels to play in (overland, underground, shadow).  Yet despite huge maps(x3) filled with hundreds of units and dozens of cities; there is still wide variety between factions.  And I've never got an out of memory error like in Civ4 or E:WOM.  Feels like a full game.  I very much like the kind of gameplay excellence that non-3D graphics offers.  But then, AOW: Shadow Magic has 3D but also has the wide variety of factions and massive maps.  So what the heck?  Why can AOW:SM handle it but not Civ4 and E:WOM?  I do prefer AOW's 2D graphics over the cluttered graphics of AOW:SM.  But even with it, the game is full!

Personally I prefer the 2D sprites to the 3D versions.  The 3D versions of Civ and AOW are cluttered.  It's easier and more efficient to identify and move the pieces on the 2D maps vs the 3D.  Thats a personal preference and may be the minority.  But surely the majority must care more about gameplay than graphics? At least the majority of 4x TBS'rs??

I think it's because of the way WoM handles the units. Each unit has several "slots" to put equipment on. Multiply that by the amount of units (escpecially with groops of units), and your memory goes bye bye. most other games don't allow you to completely customize your regular troops.

We pay a big price to be able to customize our troops.

As another non-coder, I tend to think like WhiteElk--the 3D adds no visual fun for me and just 'smells like' a big resource drain. Is it that most of the workload for the 3D aspects is on our vid cards, so even if the game had been built 2D, we'd still have the 32-bit OS limits holding back map size and total number of units?

I'd trade the 3D views in a heartbeat if we could get larger maps (from a true random map generator!). And I still pine for that apocryphal late-game, large-map battle royale with hundreds or thousands of units on each side. 

Speaking as a coder... it's really hard to speculate without being able to see the data structures in use. But it's not just "3d is bad". Sins of a Solar Empire is 3d and it can have comparatively huge numbers of units active at once without memory issues. If you backtrack before mines were added you could scale it up to crazy levels (mines appear in such numbers that they chew up a fair bit). Sins is also rather pretty for a strategy game.

Civ IV has really big maps and a ton of units stacked in them, and without a mod I've never managed to hit an OOM error in that. Civ 5 has fewer units but the huge map is still fairly large (though I believe it's smaller then the Civ 4 one, but it's hexes so it gets more love from me). Sanctum has up to 100 units on the screen at once being shot at by 50 more units (towers) and 4 players. It's 3D and doesn't run out of memory. And if you want to really push it, the Xbox 360 has 512MB total to work with, and almost everything on it is 3d. Clearly this can be done.

Since customization was mentioned specifically, I think the price you pay for that in memory is being overblown. In its simplest form you can do 10 item slots on a character with an integer array of size 10, where each array element represnts the item ID equipped in a slot. To load the unit's current attack power, you load it's base attack power (a unit property) * people in the unit (another property), then load the attack value of every item in that array. For speed purposes you'd cache that as part of the unit so you don't have to load it again.

But a 10 slot int[] is 40 bytes. Base ATK is 4 bytes assuming they use an int32, which they really don't have to (what has attack power of 2 billion?). Units in the stack is another 4 bytes (or less), and caching the current total attack power is 4 bytes.

If you decide to be more flexible and use a Linked List instead of an array, you're adding some pointers in there (if it's a doubly linked list it's 8 bytes for pointers per item in the list). You'd need hundreds of items to get up to 1KB of memory, and thus thousands of units to get to 1MB. You've got 2GB to work with here.

Now it's entirely possible to implment this in a memory-sucking way, but it doesn't have to be. You could fit an entire stack of units into 1KB easily, which means you'd need ten thousand of them to get over 10MB used by every unit on the map.

Like I said, I don't know where the memory is going. But I'm trying to illustrate a point here: blaming unit customization for OOM errors and small unit counts seems pretty silly without internal knowledge of the code.

I just recently got it... But don't the units in Alpha Centauri have more customization parameters than units in War of Magic?  If not more, then not much less.  That game seems to run fine with lots of units on huge maps.  But it's 2D not 3D. 

Civ4 is light on unit variety.  As soon as you go and make all the units for each faction look different, or add some new units, then you get the blasted MAF.  This is not the case with Civ3.  And the Civ4 maps are smaller than the Civ3 maps.  So why is it that the 2D Civ3 can support massive unit variety on huge maps, but 3D Civ4 can't handle very many additions before it MAFs out on large maps (which are smaller than Civ3 large)?  

Hey, I was just going by what Brad had said.

Memory:

I'm more concerned about how they handle the effects in the particle system and how they are creating and storing the custom unit models. All the rest can be super light.

Unit stats? a joke.

Huge armies on the map? you never copy the same unit many times, you link to a prototype, and just store the modifications like damage, enchants and so on..

There's no point thinking that 64 bits will solve your problems. If you are sloppy, 128 bits aren't gonna be of any real help to you.

Case study: Frontier Elite. Huge galaxy, with thousands of star systems with a physics model in floppy disks. At the time ppl didn't even think it would be possible to have such detail in a game -> procedural generation taught them otherwise. 

AoW:SM's art is 2D. It is just some is applied as a texture to a dynamically generated mesh.

Well, yes. That's an issue with 3D using more memory then Civ 3's very simple sprite graphics and thus having less available to load a ton of mod data. But FfH managed to fit in Civ 4, so it's not like it was undoable to drastically mod the races. (Smaller maps are not just a memory issue though, maps that are so huge that it takes 100 turns to cross them aren't something that a lot of people use.)

If they are generating a model for each unit type that would be a problem, but if they are doing things in a more memory effecient way (quite similar to dealing with unit stats) then the overhead is nothing next to the size of the art.

Well, if what Tridus says is correct, then WHERE do all the memory go??

Is graphiccardmemory interchangeable with RAM?

Yes and no. Using normal RAM for video makes things much slower (takes longer for the GPU to access it and it has to fight with the CPU for time at the memory bus). And using video RAM for normal operations is not possible as the CPU cannot access it.

That's where I'm still lost, too. What, if any, are the tradeoffs between making the eye candy 3D vs. 2D and making the guts of the game able to handle massive maps with copious units? 

The main usage of memory for 3D graphics is texures, which are typically 2D images just like sprites. The other big memory users in games are pre-rendered movies/cinematics and audio*.

* The size of uncompressed sound = sample size * channels * sample rate. 44.1 KHz 16-bit Stereo comes to about 10 megabytes a minute. However due to being somewhat linear they can be streamed rather than loading the entire (uncompressed) thing into memory.

They have been doing memory use improvements in the patches.  It might also be a change to the base code for FE that will improve performance that can't be done with a patch to WoM.  Im not really very familiar with memory usage other than a J++ or C++ project I coded in college that had a memory leak that froze the pc after so many turns (it was working with putting images to a staging area and refreshing the screen to match it).  My guess is that there may be some coding inefficiencies with the game code or the engine that could be ironed out to improve performance and free up memory.  That would probably be the better approach, as some one else mentioned having the extra memory wont give you as much of a boost if there is a problem elsewhere.  The patches have notes regarding freeing up memory, so they are already working on it.

Speaking of memory and since RAM can't help videomemory and viceversa, then there's no stopping adding in beatiful extras for those of us with highend cards. Makes me remember Brad saying that there would be ShaderModel 4.0 stuff in War of Magic....

To make up for that I request some ShaderModel 5.0 things    And while they're at it, DirectX 11 and tesselation would be cool aswell 

I play on a laptop, and as a college student I don't have the money for a high end desktop because I am paying for an education so I can eventually get one, I play strategy games because they're usually not memory hogs. I mean I am only working with 1 gig of ram (Yeah, I know.. WTF?) and an integrated video card, so when does it become a trade off between high-end eye candy and play-ability on lower end systems? On WoM I get these weird graphical glitches with huge chunks of textures missing but as one poster said I can go back to Alpha Centauri and play this amazing game, with great unit customization, and an amazing game period. I don't see why games can't be made like that. I say playability over graphics any day. (*Coughdwarffortressandmasterofmagiccough*)

Unfortuantely it's not that simple. You do need RAM allocated for swaps (because not everyone has a 1GB video card and stuff will have to be moved around), for software rendering if the game supports it on low end hardware, and because if you Alt+Tab the entire memory buffer is unloaded and has to be stored somewhere if you want to restore it without having to rebuild the entire state. That "somewhere" is in RAM.

You could see this issue really prominently in early versions of Windows Vista, because Vista included a memory manager that would allocate RAM to do that... but XP didn't so DX9 applications were also allocating RAM to do it. That was why OOM issues were so common in pre-SP1 Vista in games that worked in XP. This and this have a decent explanation of that specific problem, which has some insight on what's going on in general. To really get a good explanation of this you'd need a Direct3D coder in here to explain it, which I'm not.

But yes, you do need RAM allocated to do this stuff.

First, are you replying to me or the threadquestion?

If your computer sucks, then you play on small maps.

You should probably play on the cloth map as much as possible. That doesn't tax the graphics engine nearly as hard and will probably work better on a system like that. But stuff should work better then it does, I mean the first two Disgaea games both have better tactical combat then WoM does (becuase that's really what they are in terms of gameplay), and the PS2 has 32MB of RAM. You'd think we could beat that with 2GB to work with.

I suspect one day Stardock will look back on it and say that trying to build their own engine was the mistake that led to a lot of the other problems.