Windows users rejoice.

[Streetwind]

I'm with the small number of skeptics here. This is not an announcement, this is a tongue in cheek tease in less than 140 characters from an employee's private social media account.

Oh, it's perfectly possible that we'll get exactly what everyone is hoping for. And I'll be just as happy as everyone else. But I'm certainly not going to consider it guaranteed. The reactions here in this thread are way too typical - the slightest hint that can be interpretated in a favorable manner is instantly taken as a promise/full committment to deliver what the community has interpretated. Which all too often was a false interpretation, but instead of acknowledging that, the community then goes and burns the devs at the stake like a rabid mob when it turns out they meant something else all along.

I'm not going to be participating in this kind of behavior. Call me when we have a proper official announcement.

[Pixel of Life]

If this is what I think it is, it'll be absolutely amazing. I'll probably have to get 8 more gigs of RAM

[selfish_meme]

The relevant Physx performance announcement, TLDR we could see up to a doubling of performance in some edge cases up to tenfold.

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/07/08/high-performance-physics-in-unity-5/

That's still pretty huge, but your still not going to get 1000 part count ships, maybe 400-500, and you could probably run two of those ships close to each other without too much degradation. Dock them however and it's back to slideshow.

[KasperVld]

where is Kasper when we need him to pour cold water over everyone?

At 3:30AM I was asleep

We'll have more news/details for you guys soon, right here on the forums

[StarStreak2109]

All hail SQUAD!

[cantab]

SomethingAwful is the place you're thinking about.

Seriously??? Isn't that place pretty much the antithesis of family-friendly? Considering how uptight Squad's rules are on their own places, it's really at odds to then be posting stuff over there.

[AlphaAsh]

I'm gonna be jaded and not believe it works until I actually get my hands on a stable win64 build that doesn't fall apart once memory usage goes above 4Gb and is fine with memory being churned by the game and plugins for a few hours of playing. Trust but verify and all that. I hope it works, but previous experience has taught me not to hype or expect anything.

We'll be too busy completely re-writing GUi code to have time to worry about 64bit support anyway. It's going to be a slog to just get front-ends working again.

[allmhuran]

Seriously??? Isn't that place pretty much the antithesis of family-friendly?

You're probably thinking of old, old SA. Since it became a serious community site things changed somewhat. The need for paid membership for forum access does help to increase the signal to noise ratio somewhat. The "SA forum goons" as an organised group of MMO troll players is an even more recent phenomenon. But still, not sure why so much info gets posted there, other than the fact that it is a huge (albeit private) community. If SA wants something to go viral, it goes viral. In fact, 4chan could be seen as an "offshoot" of SA.

[Higgs]

Still not going to trust or believe anything about 64 bit until i see it in my copies folders, then i will not trust that it is stable or efficient until i see it for myself. Once bitten twice shy. And to be blunt, the real lack of REAL updates about the game by devs makes me nervous. I could not care less that the office is being remodeled. What i DO care about is this absurd need for forum members to announce things here when it seems squad devs cant be bothered to update us here instead of everyother forum out there or social media. I could rant more but why bother? /rant

[EladDv]

At 3:30AM I was asleep

We'll have more news/details for you guys soon, right here on the forums

*wonders if he will mention Kasper again he will show up*

owwwww the tease is too much to take!

[KasperVld]

Still not going to trust or believe anything about 64 bit until i see it in my copies folders, then i will not trust that it is stable or efficient until i see it for myself. Once bitten twice shy. And to be blunt, the real lack of REAL updates about the game by devs makes me nervous. I could not care less that the office is being remodeled. What i DO care about is this absurd need for forum members to announce things here when it seems squad devs cant be bothered to update us here instead of everyother forum out there or social media. I could rant more but why bother? /rant

Max just got out of a meeting and was very excited to share the headline. We're working on a more detailed post for the forums

[Columbia]

Still not going to trust or believe anything about 64 bit until i see it in my copies folders, then i will not trust that it is stable or efficient until i see it for myself. Once bitten twice shy. And to be blunt, the real lack of REAL updates about the game by devs makes me nervous. I could not care less that the office is being remodeled. What i DO care about is this absurd need for forum members to announce things here when it seems squad devs cant be bothered to update us here instead of everyother forum out there or social media. I could rant more but why bother? /rant

The forums aren't the capital of Squad's announcement system, ya know. And the forums seem pretty impractical to type small bits such as "We have 64 reasons to be excited about 1.1." Just my USD 0.02.

[X-SR71]

I doubt 64-bit would bring stock performance improvements and I don't use enough mods to reach the 4gb limit..

I am super interested in the Unity 5 upgrade though!

[Ignath]

I really hope it is much better than the current Win64 Community hack. I set up a modded install of it that runs a bit over 5GB of RAM, which is awesome, but there are glitches. Not outright crashes, just little frustrations like icons disappearing, parts going missing from the editor lists, and funkiness with mouse clicks in apps other than KSP when it is running and afterwards (seriously).

Regarding the bold section: I had this issue as well with the old x64 build. I found if you right-click in the menu bar of the application you're having issues with, it clears the mouse click issue up. Not really a solution, but an easy work-around if it were to still be an issue.

[MaverickSawyer]

*does happy dance*

[Higgs]

We have a forum for announcements by the devs for the purpose of keeping us informed of the state of the game Columbia. I, much like other users do not use social media for a variety of reasons, so tweeting updates or posting to fb does not cover people like me. I dont use reddit for personal reasons, so swing and miss there. I dont check orbiters forum for ksp info because orbiter =/= ksp and many redirected updates other users have posted came from orbiters forum.... I should and very much do think its reasonable to think a forum for this game is the ideal location for such updates. But i must be crazy to think that. My $0.02. Oh and $0.02 columbia, the forum by all rights should be the said capital, because color me nutty this is the games forum. Maybe im an old internet nut, but a forum for a game should be the primary repository for said information. But again thats my $0.02.

Kasper to be fair, i have not seen an official dev post on it so i remain faithfully skeptical of stability and efficiency and likelihood of 64 bit. Just saying.

[StarStreak2109]

Hi Higgs,

to a certain extent, I think you are right. OTOH I believe this is not a reason for ranting. I would have preferred had they teased this fact on the forums as well, but be that as it may, twitter etc. are the way to go, as it seems. And the "bush drums" seem to have worked, as we see. Just my two cents...

[Umlüx]

can't wait! i will mod soooo hard!

[Higgs]

Starstreak like i said, i dont use social media for private reasons. So this site is where i find my info. Again and i hold this as truth: a forum placed by the devs for a game should be the primary and first informed location of updates pertaining to said game. Be it CoD or GTA or KSP one would logically expect to find info for a given game in its forum. Its frustrating to basically hunt everywhere but here for info. But this is going circular and thusly i am ripping up on the ejection handle as my point is and has been made a few times now. Eject eject eject....fwoosh.

[godefroi]

I said this in another thread today. Programming does not work that way. A single craft can have 1 thread or hundreds of threads depending on how the programmer did it. There is no way to equate an in game item/vessel/etc. to a thread. Conversely, 1 thread can be 100 vessels, or 1 thread can do calculations for 1 part each on 100 vessels.

In this case, we know how the (Unity) programmers did it. A single craft will (still) be single-threaded, almost certainly.

- - - Updated - - -

I would be looking forward to 64-bit, if I didn't have a 32-bit machine.

I would be upgrading my machine, if I had the money.

You sure about that? Unless you're running an Atom (which you're not, not if you're running KSP), or your CPU is more than ten years old, you're running a 64-bit machine. The last non-64-bit Intel chip was the pre-D0 stepping of the Prescott core, released in 2004. Starting February 2005, the D0 stepping Pentium-4F has the 64-bit extensions. AMD processors with 64-bit capabilities became available in 2003.

Now, it's believable that you're running a 32-bit operating system, like Windows XP 32-bit edition, but if you are, then you certainly have less than 4GB of RAM (more likely something like 2GB), in which case 64-bit won't help you (it'd be worse, not better, because in 64-bit pointers take up twice the memory), and your KSP experience is already plenty miserable. I pray for you.

- - - Updated - - -

For all intents and purposes, same difference. Multiple cores run concurrent threads, the only difference is multi-threading is controlled by the programmer while multi-core is handled by the framework. Multi-threading is improved by multi-core but can be done on a single core too. If you personify it, it becomes a little easier to understand. This is an over simplification.

Excellent explanation. The only thing I'd clarify is that multi-threading on a single core can be done, but it's not guaranteed to increase overall performance. Indeed, if all the executing threads are CPU bound (i.e. you're spending all your time at the desk actually working, and not sitting around waiting for results from others), you end up decreasing performance, because you spend a lot of time walking back and forth across the hall, returning old tasks and picking up new ones, and rearranging everything on your desk. This is known as context switch overhead. The more threads you have competing for CPU time, the more overhead there is. The reality is, however, that most threads spend their time waiting for something that is vastly slower than the CPU (like disk, network, etc), and so busy threads can get a lot of useful work done. In most common scenarios, there's really only one or two busy threads, and everyone else is waiting around for something.

[ModZero]

Sheesh. You should all calm down. It's 64 bit depth on the sound samples.

[Alshain]

Excellent explanation. The only thing I'd clarify is that multi-threading on a single core can be done, but it's not guaranteed to increase overall performance. Indeed, if all the executing threads are CPU bound (i.e. you're spending all your time at the desk actually working, and not sitting around waiting for results from others), you end up decreasing performance, because you spend a lot of time walking back and forth across the hall, returning old tasks and picking up new ones, and rearranging everything on your desk. This is known as context switch overhead. The more threads you have competing for CPU time, the more overhead there is. The reality is, however, that most threads spend their time waiting for something that is vastly slower than the CPU (like disk, network, etc), and so busy threads can get a lot of useful work done. In most common scenarios, there's really only one or two busy threads, and everyone else is waiting around for something.

This is true. That is why CPU Cache is so important when buying a CPU. If RAM is a guy sitting in an office across the hall, cache is a guy sitting in a neighboring cubicle and you can just hand stuff over the top of the wall. Cache is like RAM, but on the CPU die, so there is less pipeline for data to travel through. But it is small, very small.

[EladDv]

*wonders if he will mention Kasper again he will show up*

owwwww the tease is too much to take!

Max just got out of a meeting and was very excited to share the headline. We're working on a more detailed post for the forums

i truly am the Kasper whisperer

[KasperVld]

By the looks of things the post we're working on will be released tomorrow

[regex]

By the looks of things the post we're working on will be released tomorrow

Wooooo! Two days after the tweet, fantastic! I can't wait for my outdated news!