Still a great product though.
Techie question: Is a 64 bit version planned?
I am very interested in knowing this too.
64 bit OS's are becoming more common.
I do not know a single person on any kind of personal level, offline or online, that has used 32bit after Vista and especially after W7. 32bit is still in use of course (
XP is eternal after all), and it makes sense from the business perspective of making it 32bit so as to effectively allow anyone to partake in the product. That said though, it's a bit regressive to create something in 2013(
/14) with the intention of keeping it within the limitations of operating systems that are 3 generations (
or more) behind. I'd be willing to bet that more people purchasing W7 or W8 machines are getting 64bit than 32bit, even if unaware of what they're buying.
I would be happy enough if we could at least upgrade to a 64bit version, I'd even being willing to pay for it. I suppose LW would need to be assured enough people would also be willing to pay for it though, since having two commercial versions of RW to maintain would likely require more staff or higher pay for those already here.
As far as the map being larger than a screen and zooming and scrolling, well, I like that ability in Google Maps. I doubt that would be a downside for people wanting to load larger maps.
I'm not really sure what the point was being made about maps being too large for the screen, aside from the technical. Just my personal preference but I always prefer maps that are too big for my screen. Chiefly because it means they have a much higher threshold of quality before image degradation. Baring someone doing something stupid, like blowing up a low quality image, a giant source image typically means a high quality image. It's the primary reason I elected to use the Pathfinder Folio map instead of the others -- superior image quality at any level (
it's also the only one that is actually visually accurate to locations within the books; the other maps are not 1:1 with the sectional maps in most Pathfinder books). Even at 100% the map is crisper than any of the others (
provided you are extracting the map from the PDF and not screen-capturing it -- you'll lose the word layer of course but sacrifices must be made).
Why settle for the lesser version of something when you are getting the same base entity anyway, is what I'm saying here. If there's a 2000x2000 version of a map and a 4000x4000 of the same map (
and it's not just a blown version of the smaller one), you can be sure I'm getting the bigger one. It's the same map but I know that at any zoom level the bigger map is going to look better and provide superior functionality for map manipulation. In fact I've only ever used the smaller versions of maps because of some limitation with the software I'm using.
My preferences aside though; on the technical side I can understand creating the hard limit, since it lessens the possibility of someone importing a map into RW with their 64bit client and then someone using their 32bit client to display the map and crashing. That's without the mass of problems web-access would cause with people looking at the maps using the plethora of browsers available (
if web-access is browser neutral), many of which have 32bit and 64bit versions (
most of which could be avoided I believe if, upon import, the map could be "flagged" as for-use-with-64bit -- you could extend this flagging to any other needed aspect of Realm Works too). No doubt that would be one headache after another for support.
Regardless I still firmly support the idea of a 64bit version of RW, in the future of course. When focus shifts to adding upon the existing, functioning aspects of RW.
