Unity 5 to have 64bit support?

[pslytely psycho]

From PC gamer:

Unity 5 unveiled at GDC 2014

Ian Birnbaum at 12:00 on 18 March 2014

"Unity 5, the latest version of the popular game development engine, was unveiled at the Game Development Conference in San Francisco today. The new update will include big updates to Unity’s audio and lighting tools and 64-bit engine support."

Could it truly be? This would be such a boon to KSP.

Can anyone confirm this? I realize that it would take some time to port it over to U5 when it is released, plus testing etc., but this news excites me almost as much as the ARM mission pack and 0.24.....

Bill, Jeb, and Bob approve IF true....

http://www.pcgamer.com/2014/03/18/unity-5-unveiled-at-gdc-2014/?ns_campaign=article-feed&ns_mchannel=ref&ns_source=steam&ns_linkname=0&ns_fee=0#null

[Dispatcher]

From Unity's site we learn that Unity 5.0 will feature a 64 bit editor. I saw no specific mention of 64 bit gameplay performance, so for that, I guess its still an open question. I'll look into it some more.

Edit: a Unity forum thread on the subject. Ooops! That's quite an old thread.

This GDC article seems to indicate 64 bit engine support.

Edited March 27, 2014 by Dispatcher

[Faark]

Could it truly be? This would be such a boon to KSP.

Yea, loading times would definitively explode into... sry, but increasing the addressable memory so you don't have to fix a fundamental design flaw just looks plain wrong to me.

[pslytely psycho]

As I am not a developer, coder or ?, I have been under the impression that the 'load everything at the start,' was more or less a placeholder and would be addressed with optimazations. Is this incorrect?

I would like to see 64 bit regardless, just for the increase in not only RAM addresses, but the performace boose that 64 bit should entail. (better still, multi threaded physics....?...if that's even possible. Would love to use all 8 cores.)

[problemecium]

I s'pose it's because I don't generally keep more than a few small mods hanging around, but even the way it is I've never had trouble with memory. My hopes for 64-bit support are that it'll mean faster processing (if I'm not misinformed). Oh, and as psycho mentioned, multi-core stuff would also help.

[phoenix_ca]

As I am not a developer, coder or ?, I have been under the impression that the 'load everything at the start,' was more or less a placeholder and would be addressed with optimazations. Is this incorrect?

I would like to see 64 bit regardless, just for the increase in not only RAM addresses, but the performace boose that 64 bit should entail. (better still, multi threaded physics....?...if that's even possible. Would love to use all 8 cores.)

Yes, I imagine they'll fix their somewhat absurd load-all-the-things method with something more adaptive, eventually. At least I hope they do. I can understand why though. It's easier to get an idea of what the worst-case scenario for memory use is if you do that, and what's more, optimizing software before it's finished, in an alpha no less, is the wrong way to go about things. Well usually. It's not so bad if you know you aren't going to change whatever you're optimizing ever again but who can say that? If it's not done, you'll inevitably just go back and change the code you optimized so that it needs to be optimized again for the changes. Big time waster right there. Even with a simply Python script, doing that could waste many hours. Expand that to a game like KSP and...yeah. Lots of time potentially wasted.

Performance boosts from multiple cores are usually quite small for games. You can thread it all you want, but as almost everything needs to be done in realtime, you'll still only be as fast as your slowest thread. Everything else could be finished to render a frame but hanging for a bit waiting for, I dunno, some physics calculation to process. Most processors today run so blisteringly fast too that really all you need for a game is two cores, one if it will launch with just one available. If you want performance gains for single applications, you need to get into overclocking and custom cooling to give yourself more room to overclock with stability. Multi-cores are for multi-tasking, not for gaming. When building a gaming PC, you're better off getting the fastest clock speeds you can get on the most recent architecture, with a modest number of cores so that the game and system/background processes don't step on each other's feet, as it were.

The big benefit we'll likely see if Squad upadtes KSP to 64-bit the memory addressing issue being...addressed. Loading-up a pile of mods without out-of-memory errors would be nice. (I regularly get these. Running KSP I'm on the brink of CTD pretty much all the time at an average 3.1GB memory use. Quicksaves are my friend. Lots, and lots, and lots of quicksaves.) And it does have practical application for the devs and the stock game too. I don't know how affected Squad has been by the 32-bit editor but plenty of devs designing large projects have reported the Unity 4 editor as being intolerably unresponsive. The new editor should fix that, and any less headache for Squad when using Unity is always good news for KSP. That, and planets and other systems, all that, could be hugely expanded without that 3.4GB ceiling. Just think about Krag's Planet Factory. That thing only added what I'd call a rather modest number of new celestial bodies, but it eats RAM like mad.

Edited April 14, 2014 by phoenix_ca

[Sakata]

Threading is also a damned headache when it comes to coding. The biggest things I can see for 64bit are addressing the 3G barrier that is the bane of all modding, and actually using the x64 processor to its full potential, speeding up the game. Heck i'd imagine that they're having to use some silly hacks to get calculations done right due to x86. Also the OS will like it more 'cause then no visualization.