Stardock's new game -- Elemental: War of Magic

[Martok]

I read that too, although I confess I don't understand the significance (of 32-bit and 64-bit machines). How is the latter so much better than the former?

And incidentally, how do I know whether my PC is a 32-bit or 64-bit? I'd sure like to know whether my computer could support "epic" maps.

[Zenicetus]

I read that too, although I confess I don't understand the significance (of 32-bit and 64-bit machines). How is the latter so much better than the former?

It's probably related to the amount of RAM that can be accessed. A 32-bit system has a ceiling of 4 gigs (IIRC), and the theoretical ceiling on 64-bit is something ridiculous like 16 million terabytes. Practically speaking, it just means you can get past the 4 gig ceiling, if people are willing to install more physical RAM. If you have 8 gigs of RAM in a 64-bit system, a game can use all of it (less the OS overhead, natch).

So here's why you'd want that in a strategy game. With something like a FPS game, local terrain can be loaded off the hard drive in chunks (often transparently, in the background) as the player moves around the game world. The world can be immense (WoW, for example), but the game never has to show more than what the player can see in the immediate surroundings.

A strategy game though, has to calculate all the actions and movements of every faction spread across the entire game map, on every turn... not just what the player can see for his or her own faction. It would slow down the time each turn takes, if the map had to be split up and loaded in pieces off the hard drive. So, a humongous strategy gameworld with multiple AI opponents requires humongous RAM.

I'm making assumptions here, but I think that's the relation to 32-bit vs. 64-bit systems. And it's the OS that has to support 64 bit too, not just the machine. I'm not up on current PC hardware and OS limits, so maybe someone else can jump in on that question.