A few hours ago, the good folks at Paradox officially announced their plans to switch Stellaris to 64-bit (you can read about it here if you haven’t yet). We had inklings this is going to happen ever since it was announced that Paradox’s latest game Imperator will be 64-bit. Both games use the same eco-system (Clausewitz), so it made sense that this technical overhaul will percolate to Stellaris.
The dev diary makes it very clear that the switch to 64-bit is not a magic bullet, but as we, the New Horizons team, brought up the subject of 64-bit and the aging eco-system limitation, I thought it’s important that we set expectations as well – to the limit of what we know so far.
As you might know, for the past year or so, our almost constant response is that we are unable to add any significant new amount of contents and models to the game, as we are at capacity. To be specific, certain parts of the Clausewitz ecosystem were still in 32-bit, which forces the entire system, and its memory allocation, to use 32-bit.
32-bit file and memory allocation mean we can really only address a theoretical amount of 4GB of memory (in practice, around 3 to 3.5 GB). You might recall that a year ago, we had far more frequent cases of instability and CTD’s, especially with Mac OS computers. In time, due to some tools we developed (and thank Dayshine, our tool developer in the team), we understood the issue was memory overflow and slowly started pruning some content until we reached a point of rough equilibrium, where most players reported they no longer experienced frequent CTD’s.
Since then, we have not crossed that rough threshold we found (which takes into consideration the unpacked size of the mod and of course, vanilla content). Every new addition to the game in term of ship models and textures, anything that requires rapid access to memory, was counterbalanced by either removing content, or by improving it. We have spent literally thousands of hours improving our models and textures, slowly shaving them off, so we can add the new Starfleet, Klingon, and Romulan ships, with their overhauls.
The move to 64-bit should help reduce the instability issues some players are still experiencing (Especially with Mac) and it should give us, as developers, a bit more breathing room. I want to stress that term – a bit. The main mod and sub-mod, especially in late-game, already can make more than full use of 4 GB. 64-bit lets you handle more memory, but it makes no guarantee as to the availability of the memory. We hardly want to start saying the mod has a minimum requirement of 16 GB of memory, as it could easily cost us a lot of players who enjoy the game and have less than up to date computers.
Not to mention, more content equals, eventually, more development overhead, more potential bugs, longer loading times and even potential performance impact. So yes, there is a lot of content we wish we can add, but do not expect a drastic change to New Horizons and a flood of new ships and textures being added to the game. Instead, this is going to be more of a slow trickle, as we find a new balance that we and you, the players, are comfortable with in term of performance and stability.
Another limit brought about by 32-bit is that our Steam mod files are limited to roughly 2 GB of content. I should clarify that as far as we know right now, the 64-bit overhaul will not address this issue, as PDX made no mention of it. So, while yes, we can add more content into sub-mods, there are certain things that MUST exist in the main mod. So, while we could, in theory, start moving some things to the sub-mod and slightly increase the size of the main mod, as we have no plans to have multiple sub-mods at this time, there is still another upper limit.
Finally, I want to stress that, like PDX make it clear in their dev diaries, from a technical point of view there is no reason to expect a performance improvement just from the 64-bit overhaul. We don’t know how the changes mentioned in the diary will specifically help New Horizons.
Thankfully, the good people at PDX are doing a few other things with this patch. The comment about further improvements into jobs threading is promising, considering New Horizons has about ten times more jobs than vanilla. That MIGHT mean the performance improvements (mentioned to be between 10% and 30%) will be more toward 30% than 10% in our case. It would certainly be very welcome.
In that spirit, I want to remind readers that we are currently running a very important survey concerning performance on our Discord server (which you can find here), which I’d appreciate if everyone could participate in.
As always, I hope you found this blog post interesting. I have a few more updates coming up soon, as well.
Tell us, Admiral, why did you leave Starfleet? – Unknown to Jean-Luc Picard