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Here's the update for the week thru October 21st...
While this past week has been difficult for me physically (see above), it’s actually been reasonably productive from a coding standpoint. I’m also at a point where I can talk publicly about something that I’ve been working on. Specifically, Realm Works is essentially now ported to operate as a native 64-bit application. We’re still not entirely out of the woods yet, as testing has uncovered a number of problems thus far – and a couple of them still need to be resolved. I’ll be focusing on those in the days ahead, and I’ll be doing a lot more testing, but it’s looking quite promising at this point.
Many of you are probably quite happy at this news. Some are saying it’s about time. And some are questioning what the big deal is. So allow me to quickly address the latter two groups.
Converting RW to be a 64-bit application was not a simple matter of recompiling the product. In fact, there were a range of complicating factors that had to be dealt with. We leverage many third party components, some of which don’t play nice in a 64-bit space – and one of those components is still being wrangled. We have our own custom components that we wrote in C++ with 32-bit assumptions, where the logic does a bunch of byte level data manipulations for performance – those had to be overhauled to run smoothly as 64-bit. We need to support both 32-bit and 64-bit platforms, since some users are still on 32-bit machines, so that means everything has to adaptively switch based on what machine RW gets installed on. None of this was rocket science, but there was quite a bit of work involved.
As to why this is a big deal, it all boils down to memory. A 32-bit application is limited in how much memory it can use, which is much less than you actually have on your computer. RW often uses lots of memory – the exact amount depends on the size of your realm and how many pictures, maps, tabs, and whatnot you have open at one time. In fact, memory related crashes are currently the third most common issue that users run into. And all the huge adventures we’ll be providing to KS backers and offering in the Content Market will exacerbate this problem and likely make it the #1 problem if we don’t address it. By switching to 64-bit, all those memory issues will basically disappear for the vast majority of users.
During the week ahead, I’ll be finishing up the 64-bit conversion. This includes a lot of testing to make sure everything works correctly after conversion. It also includes investigating and resolving whatever issues I uncover, and the number and complexity of those issues is a complete unknown at this point. Meanwhile, David has been helping out a bit and Steve will be shifting his primary focus to issues in the RW UI this week. So I’m getting reinforcements, and we’ll hopefully continue to make good headway.
Thanks, Rob
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